My World Story Book: Asia/South Seas/Scandinavia

MY WORLD STORY BOOK

Asia / South Seas / Scandinavia

A Compilation of Historical Biographies for the Young Reader

Compiled by Marlene Peterson

Libraries of Hope

My World Story Book

Book One: Asia / South Seas / Scandinavia

Copyright © 2021 by Libraries of Hope, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. International rights and foreign translations available only through permission of the publisher.

Cover Image: The Norwegians Land in Iceland Year 872, by Oscar Wergeland (1877). In public domain, source Wikimedia Commons.

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2950 B.C., Asia-China

He moulded an empire as a potter moulds a piece of clay. He was The Father of China, and her first emperor. Fo-hi achieved such wonders that old writers used to pause and ask themselves whether he was really a man or an epoch.

Was he Fo-hi, flesh and blood, son, brother, husband, father, or was he the name for an age? Was he a human being, like Alfred, or Caesar, or William the Conqueror or was he an era, like the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, or the Renaissance? The answer now seems to point to the fact that Fo-hi was really a man, and that he did the marvellous things ascribed to him; the dates can be worked out with any approach to accuracy, he lived and reigned about 2950 years before Jesus, and established a civilisation from which the whole world must have borrowed.

We do not know how far ahead of us China was, but there is a record in Chinese history of the tenth century of the printing of nine classics from wooden blocks. If we find printed books being sold to the public in days when England was still a small, illiterate, Saxon kingdom, we may be sure China was already familiar with printed books long before those nine classics were ordered for the benefit of the public by the Chinese emperor.

When Rome was a wilderness the Chinese were a refined and learned people. Their science was old before the age of Greece; they were a civilised power before Egypt. It is not astonishing, therefore, to know that this wonderful country, long ago in ancient days, produced a phenomenal man centuries ahead of his time.

Fo-hi’s empire is the oldest on Earth; it was in existence nearly 5000 years ago. The great days of Egypt,

Sacred Mountains and Precious Groves, Fang Congyi

Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, and Rome came and departed; each empire rose and fell in turn, but China remained unchanging. No other nation is comparable with it; no other nation, in ancient days, was so safe by its position from being overrun and obliterated. When Fo-hi was born he found himself in the midst of a numerous people who seem to have been so many childish barbarians. Charles Lamb’s story of the Chinese man who burned down the house to roast the pig may have had a sort of historical precedent, for tradition asserts that the Chinese ate their food uncooked. They were free rovers, with no organised system of life. There was no marriage system; men knew their mothers but not their fathers; there was no settled agriculture, no skilled organised hunting for food. All was chaos and haphazard adventure.

Fo-hi had to make laws and establish institutions, to create a nation out of a jumble of multitudes. He established himself on the site of Kai-feng-fu, in the province of Ho-nan. He was as friendless as Mohammed, but he had a great power over his fellows. It is always one outstanding man who gets things done. The idea may not be all his own; he may share a general trend toward certain convictions; but it is the magic of a dominating mind that brings reforms to pass. Fo-hi must have been a master of ideas and methods, with patience and persuasiveness beyond comparison. He put himself, or was placed by discerning friends, at the head of those whom he could trust; he assumed authority over hosts; he became chief of many peoples composing his nation; and, proceeding from strength to strength, he became the first Emperor of China. He towered so far above the intellect of his contemporaries that they seem to have looked upon him as divine. Old Chinese history to this day makes it appear that he was of divine birth, a fact at which we need not wonder. If they believed Fo-hi as having something of divinity in him so much the better for Fo-hi, for rarely has there lived a man of grander mind. He instituted the law of marriage, a gigantic reform with illimitable consequences. It meant the setting up of permanent homes. It meant the defence and protection of the wife and children by the husband and father. But the

Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines, Ma Lin

great nation was still a jumble of mingled peoples, too great in number to be easily controlled; so Fo-hi divided the people into groups, classes, and tribes, each responsible to its tribal head, and the tribal heads governing by general laws applying to all. He taught them cooking; he devised a system of hunting and fishing, so that the industrious and skilful should not starve.

He was, perhaps, the first metal-worker, and taught his people the use of iron, giving them weapons for the chase and for the defence of their land against invaders. He must have been something of a chemist, too, for he experimented with salt, and gave it to his people with their food and as a preserver of the food they stored. By that act alone he would ensure the development of his race, for population depends fundamentally upon the abundance and scarcity of food at all times of the year.

At the beginning of his reign the people must have lived like our rude forefathers, in caves and wattle huts. Fo-hi had ideas beyond that; he taught them to build permanent dwellings. Agriculture progressed under him, but Fo-hi had his limitations. He did not discover the plough; that was left for his successor, Chen-Noung. The mere fact that so great an invention escaped his mighty mind makes the list of his actual performances seem the more believable. He thought not only of the bodies but of the minds of his people. He loved music of the Chinese sort and gave his people musical instruments.

As if he had not done enough, Fo-hi turned his searching eyes to the stars, and worked out what was probably the first calendar. He gave his people a calendar by which they could mark the successive stages of the year. Naturally a mind capable of such a feat as that did not find it difficult to

Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring, Ma Yuan

divide the day and night into hours, and he gave the nation a sort of clock.

Now, all this was before the age of writing. Ideas could be conveyed only by word of mouth or by signs. Even Fo-hi’s colossal brain could not create a true system of writing in a single reign. But he made a good beginning. He invented a system of circular diagrams, still known as the Pa Koua. By means of this system he enabled the Chinese first to express words, if not abstract ideas not on paper, but on what served then in the place of paper.

Such was the work of Fo-hi, or some of it. How much of it was committed to writing by means of his diagrams it is impossible to say; possibly none. His deeds were recorded in men’s brains and hearts. They talked of his wonders. He became a sort of god in the memory of the Chinese people. From generation to generation his name and fame were in all men’s mouths. There was at first no literature, but his fame was preserved in the memories of men until writing came to enshrine it.

Fo-hi is said to have reigned 115 years. Length of days is always attributed to the ancients who lived before authentic history, and probably his reign was shorter. But, whatever its actual duration, it certainly comprised reforms such as no other reign ever produced. He had wonderfully fine material to work on, and the material is unchanged, like many Chinese customs, today. Remember the magnificent effort by which China has in our own time dashed aside the curse of opium. That was the spirit of the people Fo-hi guided and directed.

Even now his name is cherished with reverence in China, and his tomb is shown with pride at Chin-Choo. Well may China be proud of it, for, unless her history is false, it encloses the remains of the founder of the oldest civilisation still left in the world. Fo-hi brought China from barbarism to civilisation; he gave her a social and political system which outlived all the great empires that arose in its train. He was to China what Moses was to the children of Israel, what Alfred was to England.

Chapter 2  Eric the Red

950-1003 A.D., Scandinavia-Vikings

Eric of the ruddy hair was one of the greatest of the Vikings, a sort of colossal heroic Crusoe of the North who, exiled from humanity, steered his little ship out into the unknown ocean and possessed himself of what was virtually a continent, a cold Crusoe island, ten times as big as England. His father was a Norwegian earl and, like Eric, was a very pretty fellow with a battle-axe. His use of it in a heated argument with his neighbours left so many dead that he was banished to Iceland.

Eric had to leave his native land for a similar cause and, joining his father, was so embroiled with Icelandic Vikings as hot-blooded as himself that the parliament, after surveying the dead, bade him begone with his men for three years. He could not return to Norway, otherwise,

“The world was all before them where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their rest.”

But there was no Providence for Eric, who, like all the Vikings, worshipped the old Norse gods. They believed that if a warrior died fighting he passed straight to Valhalla, the pagan heaven. So ardent were they for combat that when no enemy was handy they would take their fleets out and fight a private battle to the death among themselves in the fiords at home. There never had been such warriors, such sailors, such explorers as the Vikings.

The deadly feuds in which Eric and his father engaged were merely common form, true to Viking practice, and although they had to be officially censured we are not to regard these men as exceptionally blood-thirsty. When Eric had settled down as a prosperous and relatively peaceful ruler the saintly King Olaf sent his Bishop Thangbrand to convert Iceland and Greenland, which he did; but, true to Viking tradition and contrary to the mission of mercy he was preaching, he drew his sword in a quarrel and killed so many men that he, like Eric, was expelled from Iceland.

Eric the Red, woodcut frontispiece from 1688 Icelandic publication of Arngrímur Jónsson's Gronlandia

It was in 982 that Eric’s battles led to his banishment. He was 32 and married to Tjodhild, whose mother bore a poetic name meaning Ship’s Breast. Eric was one of the fiercest of his warlike race, hard as iron, with a born leader’s command over men. He had killed so many in his last quarrels that his followers had to conceal him while his little ship was being made ready for sea. Then, with a small company of free men and thralls, he launched away to seek over the ocean he knew not what.

He did realise that far to the west there lay land of some sort, for a Norwegian, blown out of his course, had seen little islands and a mysterious coast whose snowy surface made him call it White Shirt. Half the world was to name in those days. Eric steered south and west; the duration of his voyage is not recorded. But he must have sailed over two thousand miles in a little vessel, open like a rowing boat, with sails and the sweeps plied by the arms of his men.

How he lived and found his way remains a mystery. There was no compass to steer by, no map; there could be little provision for water; there was no fresh food, no fruit or vegetables, no wheat, nothing that we regard as essential for the prevention of that scourge of long voyages, scurvy. Salted

A Viking Raid, Ferdinand Leeke

meat, tempered by fish caught on the way, could have been the only fare. But the steering in unknown ocean ways?

Nansen, that noble Viking of our own day, himself the greatest modern master of unaided contrivance in the Arctic, tried to put himself in Eric’s place and work out his methods by close study of sagas and old legends and records. Eric never saw a clock or other time-recording instrument, unless by some chance he had robbed a monastery of its hourglass. Therefore he had to rely for safety on his own sense of time, which would be far keener than ours.

He watched the Sun and stars for guidance. He could get a day reckoning by a Viking device. When the Sun was in the south he could make a man lie down amidships and observe where the shadow of the gunwale fell on him. That would give an idea of the Sun’s altitude and afford some notion of latitude.

How keen was this time sense in the Vikings was shown in Eric’s son Leif who, when he reached American waters, was able to say that the Sun rose there at 7:30 and set at 4:30 on the shortest day of the year. From that the scientist can work out his latitude to a nicety. Eric carried birds to throw out so that he might watch their flight toward land; he would note the drift of ice and wood, and the character of free flying birds would hint to him their place of origin.

The end of his voyage brought him to his new home, the vast island continent of which the rest of the world knew nothing. He sailed from the east to the southwest, but he did not touch the eastern coast, either because he did not see it or because its rocky, barren face deterred him. He turned the southern point and sailed north, and he landed at what is now called Julianehaab, a

A Viking Funeral, Frank Bernard Dicksee

record voyage for the age.

Greenland has an internal ice-cap of 700,000 square miles, one incredibly vast glacier, in places 8000 feet thick; but there is a green verge along the coast, especially on the west, where the Viking had cast anchor. It seemed a goodly land to his stout heart and he determined to make it his kingdom. He explored and found traces of ancient habitations, the huts of a long-vanished people.

He determined to return to Iceland at the end of his banishment and get together a company of Vikings to share his newfound kingdom.

“But what will you call the land?” asked one of his comrades, as he ruefully surveyed the ice and barren wastes. “Call it Greenland,” instantly answered Eric. “But it is not everywhere or always green,” said his friend. “It matters not,” laughed the leader of Vikings; “Give it a good name and people will come to it.” And he was right, for when at the appointed time he ventured back to Iceland he had no difficulty in inducing such numbers to venture under his leadership that 25 shiploads of men and women, with livestock and stores, sailed with him in 986 to found Red Eric’s kingdom of Greenland.

He built his house at Brattelid, which means the steep side of a rock, near the inner end of the fiord of Tunugdliarfik, just north of Julianehaab. Seven and a half centuries later a Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede found and lived in the ruins of Eric’s house. It was built with the solid rock for one side, the remainder being made up of walls containing blocks of sandstone four to six feet thick, long and broad, immense slabs that reminded the visitor of Stonehenge, and made him wonder how the Vikings had got them into position.

Only 14 of the 25 ships that sailed with Eric arrived; some were driven back, some were lost at sea; one arrived after having been four years on the way, with long stops on barren islands as part of the famishing odyssey. Eric established two colonies, one about his own home, the other some hundreds of miles farther north, as if afraid to have too many Vikings to the hundred miles. He ruled with justice and wisdom, or the colony could not have survived.

In that most desolate of all the homes of Earth a literature grew up, noble literature that takes its place with the magnificent writings produced in Iceland, the first little land to have a literature of its own in modern Europe. But it is not so much from the literature that we know how Eric lived as from his rubbish-dump, his kitchen midden. There we find the remnants of what he fed his family and friends on.

There are bones and horns of very small cattle, of goats and sheep, bones of seals, of a polar bear, of some reindeer. There are no bones of fish, a fact that is eloquent to the expert. We know that Eric had no winter fodder for his horses and cattle, so he fed them on the heads, offal, and bones of fish, precisely as his descendants feed their fine ponies in Iceland today.

Grain was the precious rarity. That could come only by ship; the food staple was the flesh of animals, fish, and birds, eked out by milk. There is a picture of Eric, recorded in a saga, sorrowful almost to tears in his old age because he has no grain with which to make the yule-brew; for to give a feast at Christmas in which the Yule-brew was included sufficed in those tenth-century days to establish a man’s fame for years after.

In this case the warrior was not disappointed, for men who had come by ship and whom he desired to entertain answered, “We have malt and meal and corn in the ships, and thereof thou shalt have all thou desirest, and make such a feast as thy generosity demands.” And he made them

such a feast that its magnificence had never been equalled. But graver cares descended upon the great warrior.

He had two magnificent sons, Leif and Thorstein. Leif, hearing that a Viking making for Iceland had been blown to some unknown land in the West, set out to rediscover by design what had come to knowledge by accident. That was the famous voyage of 1000 that bought to the knowledge of Europe the existence of America nearly five centuries before Columbus set sail. Leif was afterwards called Leif the Lucky, not because he had discovered a continent; Vikings took discovery and possession of new lands as part of their natural vocation. Leif was Lucky because he had discovered and brought back a shipwrecked crew with him in safety.

That affords an unwonted aspect of character in these dreaded warriors, in respect of whom our ancestors used to pray in our churches, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us.” They deemed themselves fortunate in an opportunity for a chivalrous act to the unhappy and helpless.

Eric welcomed a weary, worn Leif in the autumn, and, as in the chapter from Homer, the son led his beneficiaries to his sire.

“It would be a worthy deed,” he said, “to take charge of the men who are homeless and to provide them with lodging.” Eric answered briefly. “Thy words shall be followed,” and he housed them and gave them land. But Leif put his formidable father to a sterner test when, returning from

Monument to Erik the Red in Narsarsuaq, Greenland

Iceland, he brought Bishop Thangbrand with him to convert Eric’s wife immediately to Christianity. Tjodhild, the first Christian in Greenland, built her own church, and, as the impenitent Eric still worshipped Thor and Odin, she separated from him and dwelled apart.

Eric growled that Leif was lucky in having rescued the shipwrecked crew, but one thing balanced another, for he had also brought “the hypocrite” (Thangbrand) to Greenland. The great leader’s sailing days were over. He had colonized with superb valour a land the very sight of which caused John Davis later to name it Desolation on the map.

Eric explored far up in the Arctic, and was in Disko Bay five hundred years before Davis imagined that he had first discovered it. His second son having died, Eric married the widow to Karlsefni Thorfinn, who in 1002 sailed with three ships, with 160 men and women, with cattle, horses, and stores, to Leif’s newly-found America, and dwelled there for three years.

Eric’s daughter as well as his daughter-in-law was of the company, and Eric became the grandfather of the first white child, a girl, born in the New World.

We do not know the year of his death, but take leave of him in the prime of life and the pride of a great Viking who had done an unprecedented thing in founding a colony in a new land just beneath the Arctic Circle. His settlement lasted nearly three and a half centuries.

Then the Black Death appeared and prevented corn ships sailing from Norway.

Eskimos killed off the famished, enfeebled white Greenlanders, and the world forgot for a century and a half that there had been such a man as Eric the Red and that there was such a place as Greenland. The land had to be discovered again, and only a rereading of the imperishable literature of Iceland literature that is supposed to have given Columbus his idea of an Eastern world in the West redeemed the shining memory of this great warrior empire-builder from lasting oblivion.

Eric was indeed the Crusoe of the North, but he had to find and furnish his own island, and that island is the largest in the world with the sole exception of Australia.

Chapter 3  James Hall

Died 1612 A.D., Scandinavia

A crusader in one of the most romantic causes that ever drew a man North, he went, not for trade or for the golden furrow to Cathay, but in quest of a lost civilisation.

The King of Denmark decided that if possible he would find the descendants of Eric the Red, the Viking who had colonised Greenland six centuries before, and he bade Hall lead the searching ships to the lost haven in the ice. There had been no communication between the colony and its motherland for nearly two centuries when Hall first set sail in 1605.

For four hundred years Eric’s descendants had kept in touch with Norway. They had horses, cattle, sheep, and goats; they fished, and hunted seals and whales; but they relied entirely for corn

A Greenlandic Settlement by a Fjord in Summer, Carl Rasmussen

and salt, so indispensable to Europeans, on the ships that sailed to Greenland from Norway and took back in exchange hides, wool, and other Greenland products that helped to furnish the Crusades.

But supply ships were often wrecked; Norway was incorporated for a time in Denmark and Sweden, who did not care about Greenland, and once the port from which the ships for Greenland sailed was wrecked, and more and more the descendants of Eric were neglected and deserted.

Finally plague swept over Europe, slaying everywhere, and killing the crews who should have sailed in the supply ships. The last vessel that reached Norway from Greenland dropped anchor in Bergen in 1410, and it brought a story of tragedy that might have come from Shakespeare, of two unhappy Greenland lovers, one of whom was burned at the stake, while the other died of grief. That was the very last message to Europe from the colony of Eric the Viking.

Hall piloted his ships to the lost colony, knowing that although Davis had sailed up the coast and found the Strait that bears his name 19 years before, all was silent as to Eric’s home. Indeed the last word had been that of the Pope in 1492, who had written appointing a monk, who was never to sail, bishop of the land that “lies at the world’s end,” pointing out that for over eighty years before that date no ship had called there and that the Greenland Christians had had neither bread nor oil.

With skill and courage Hall picked his way through the ice to the lost haven; again the next year, and the year after that. All was melancholy solitude and death, as though the plague had visited Viking Greenland as well as Europe. A generation gave itself to the loss of the Franklin Expedition, but more than three hundred years were necessary to write the story of Christian Greenland that Hall was seeking.

One of the rare seamen who could write, Hall published an admirable volume of his first two voyages, giving the world its first coherent account of the Eskimos as they actually lived. He pictured them making their winter homes with frames of the bones of whales, roofed with turf and soil to keep out the frost and snow; he showed how they disguised themselves in sealskins in order that they might approach and kill seals for food, fuel, and clothing.

What happened on the third voyage is not clear. Either Eskimos were captured to be taken back to Denmark, or in a fight some of them were slain. There is nothing to suggest that Hall was in any way responsible, but he was to pay the penalty later.

In 1612 he organised an expedition of his own. Like Sir Martin Frobisher, he was convinced that he could find gold in the Arctic, and, in spite of the great admiral’s failure, ample support was forthcoming for the scheme. He now had the great Baffin as the pilot of his second ship, and it is from him that we know what happened.

Hall reached Greenland for the fourth time, and there he was encountered by angry Eskimos, who remembered what had befallen their fellows during the previous visit of the white men. As Frobisher and later voyagers found, Eskimos never forget: history is passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation. A native hurled his spear and wounded the English leader.

The doomed man was brave and clear-headed to the last. In all his four voyages he had had with him a Scarborough boy named William Huntriss, and, now that Hall was about to die, he ordered that while the master of the second ship should succeed himself as captain, Huntriss should in turn be promoted to the captaincy of the second ship. Hall died while his ship was at sea, but was buried by his own request on the great island whose pathetic mystery he had been seven years

seeking to penetrate.

The problem that baffled him was pieced together little by little, and not finally solved until 1926. Then Dr. Norlund of Copenhagen, revisiting the old settlement, found thousands of Viking farmsteads, the ruins of a cathedral, with a bishop’s palace and outbuildings covering four acres; stables for hundreds of horses, byres for cows, the old stone pens in which sheep were folded, smithies, pigsties, and the graves of those who had been left to slow starvation and death.

One of the graves contained the skeleton of a bishop, with his pastoral staff and crozier of walrus ivory, with his gold episcopal ring on his finger, but with a foot missing, as though he had lost it during life from frost-bite or other accident. Everything pointed to the former existence of a high civilisation and a numerous population, but all had perished a century or two before James Hall gave his life in the effort to make the sad story known.

Chapter 4 

Thomas S tephens

1549-1619 A.D., Asia-India

The race was not to the swift nor the battle to the strong; Thomas Stephens, the quiet, brave scholar, won the race to India, the first Englishman there. We hardly know of him at home, but more than 300 years after his death his name shines bright in Portuguese India, where they still chant the poems written by the foreigner they called Thomaz Estevao.

Stephens was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford. Afterwards he went to Rome and became a Jesuit.

Columbus in seeking India had found the West Indies and South America; Cabot had found North America; Willoughby had perished with all his crew; Chancellor had found the White Sea and Archangel, and the way on foot to Moscow all of them seeking India, with its spices and gold. Stephens sought it only for the salvation of souls. England could not reach this promised land by

Sita at Ashokavana, unknown artist

sea, although the King of Ternate in the Moluccas had contracted with Drake to supply England with all the cloves we needed.

There was nobody to follow up that most romantic of treaties, nobody to take the determined scholar to India under the flag of England, so he enlisted under the flag of Portugal. He sailed from Lisbon in 1579, and, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, reached India the same year, to become rector of the Jesuit college in Goa.

Stephen wrote home to his father a series of letters glowingly describing the fertility of the land, the wonders of the scene, and the openings for peaceful commerce. There were no newspapers then, but news travelled as it had always travelled before printing was known, and soon commercial England was on fire with ambition to share the trade described by this pioneer

The first trading mission from England went out in 1583, and Stephens had to intervene to save the lives and liberty of its four members from the jealous Portuguese.

Stephens had his hands full, however, in other directions. The frightful Inquisition was busy in Goa, burning not only men and women but their temples and their writings. The native literature perished in the fires lit by Christians. Stephens devoted himself to the creation of a new literature for the stricken people.

He was the first Christian to write a line for publication in India. He wrote a grammar for the natives, and then, when that had sunk in, he applied its principles in a translation of the New Testament. It left his hands as a great poem, and the people came to know and love the Christian faith through his poetry. It has been often reprinted, and is still beloved of native Christians in Portuguese India. That was the foundation of Christian literature in India.

Forty years he lived in India, and there he died. He was revered as a saint. He feared no danger, but braved peril, disease, and discomfort in a strange land, first of his nation to do so, to bring glad tidings to a people for whom his heart yearned.

Cover page of the book of Fr. Thomas Stephens's Doutrina Christam em Lingoa Bramana Canarim

Chapter 5 

Gustavus Adolphus

1594-1632 A.D., Scandinavia-Sweden

He was born in Stockholm at a time when terrible events between Roman Catholics and Protestants were brewing in Europe. His father Charles the Ninth was able and conscientious, and in spite of the perils amid which he moved he educated his son with thoroughness and wisdom. Gustavus was a bright, handsome boy of splendid brain and spirit. He was a Viking cradled in a Christian home, and the latent energies of his wonderful race blazed volcanic within him.

Whatever he did he did with all his might. He had a gift for languages and wrote and spoke five with fluency. He revelled in mathematics and made himself master of all the science that was then known to civilization. His body as well as his mind was developed and he grew into a magnificent specimen of manhood, tall, broad, and muscular, with gigantic strength. Withal he had the true spirit of a crusader.

His father died when Gustavus was only 17, and the boy sovereign inherited a perilous throne. He had three wars on his hands, but he was afraid of none of them. The youngest man of the Council was Count Axel Oxenstierna, who was eleven years his senior. Gustavus recognized in him a man of noble spirit and chose him as his Prime Minister. Never was a more perfect combination than Gustavus and Oxenstierna. They were like brothers.

Gustavus had the Viking valour, reinforced by brilliant mental gifts and scholarship; Oxenstierna was just as courageous, but he had the cool wisdom of a statesman. Delightful letters passed between the two while Gustavus was away fighting and his

Portrait of Gustavus Adolphus, anonymous artist

brilliant minister was directing the helm of state at home.

“You are so cold in your proceedings that you act perpetually as a drag on my activity,” the king laughingly grumbled in one of his letters, to which his trusty minister replied, “If I did not perpetually throw cold water on you, you would catch fire and blaze up once for all.”

The early years of Gustavus as king were occupied with his inherited wars. He compelled the Danes to make peace; he was as successful with Russia, who had to cede him Riga and a great part of Latvia. He withstood all the efforts of the Poles and at last had peace within his borders. The importance of his triumphs to history is that he defeated the Roman Catholic plan to capture the Baltic, with the North Sea, and with it their trade, and so to reduce England and Protestant Holland to submission.

Sweden was a little country, but Gustavus made her the most formidable military force in Europe. He was about to be drawn into conflict with the whole forces of Spain, Austria, and Roman Catholic Germany, against the most ruthless and lawless armies ever engaged in the wars of religion,

Gustavus Adolphus Bids Farewell to his Consort, Maria Eleonora i Erfurt, Pehr Lindhberg

with two merciless geniuses, Count Tilly and Albrecht von Wallenstein at their head. They had in their ranks butchers and brigands who burned, pillaged, and martyrized wherever they went.

Destitution and horror remained behind them. Such was the suffering of the famine-stricken victims that they were driven to cannibalism. Gustavus prepared for the mighty conflict he knew must come.

He raised funds, perfected his army, and revolutionized the art of warfare. Until his time men had gone into battle heavy with armour, with set, inflexible tactics, accustomed to fight during summer and, like Caesar’s armies, to retire to secluded quarters for the winter. Gustavus abolished armour and winter rests, and completely altered tactics. He trained his infantry to perform intricate evolutions under fire, he trained his cavalry to charge in masses and to manoeuvre with the easy precision of professional trick-riders.

Above all he inspired his men with zeal for their cause and taught them to realise that they were fighting not only for their hearths but for freedom to live unfettered, to trade unrestricted, and to worship as conscience dictated. It was in 1630 that the Swedish hero, acceding to the moving appeals of the dying Protestants, crossed into Germany.

His army was only 15,000 strong, and there may have been only 8000 Swedes in it, with the remainder English and Scots. The Duke of Hamilton alone took six regiments to fight for the sacred cause; and if we are to believe Scott, the immortal Major Dugald Dalgetty, who strides such a glorious figure of learned martial fun through The Legend of Montrose, was no inconsiderable fighter in that marvellous army.

Never did a leader embark on a more perilous enterprise than that of Gustavus. The ferocious

Gustavus Adolphus Before the Battle of Lutzen, Ludwig Braun

Tilly and Wallenstein, by wholesale massacre of Protestant men, women, and children had so terrorized the land that Protestant princes were cowed and afraid to raise their heads. They had summoned Gustavus and they left the fighting to him. The Roman Catholics jeered as the little army sailed into Pomerania. “The Snow King will soon melt in the South,” they said.

But the Snow King and his army in sheepskins did not melt. He roused the fallen cowards into action and made them march with him. Everywhere his genius made him victorious. His tactics bewildered the far greater forces of his enemies. Europe marvelled at his skill and bravery, and men from all nations flocked to his camp as to a military university to learn the arts of war as those arts were practiced under his skilled direction.

Eighty fortified towns fell before him in eight months. He fought continuously; there were no winter quarters for him. He won battle after battle; he never knew a reverse. In September 1931 he met the dreaded Tilly at Breitenfeld and inflicted on that fanatical zealot his first great defeat, and by so doing liberated all North Germany.

Following Tilly up to the Rhine, he took Mainz in December. Then, forcing the passage of the Lech in April, Gustavus pursued Tilly into Bavaris, and at Ingolstadt Tilly died of his wounds. Anyone of that age but Gustavus would have thrust on to Vienna to secure a spectacular triumph, but he was a statesman as well as a warrior, and knew that an enemy army in the field and not a gay capital was the true objective of a great general.

The Emperor had recalled the terrible Wallenstein, with unlimited power, to the head of the

Death of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden at the Battle of Lützen, Carl Wahlbom

Roman Catholic forces. He, Tilly, and Gustavus are the three great military figures of the age, and the Swedish Lion had now to face his mightiest antagonist. He scorned an easy conquest of Austria, which would have made him lord of Europe for a moment, but with Wallenstein preparing new horrors on a still greater scale.

The mere raising of his flag brought fresh hordes of bloodthirsty mercenaries to the side of Wallenstein. Gustavus turned in pursuit of him. His enemy cunningly entrenched at Nuremberg, and not all the valour and genius of Gustavus could overcome him; but he was driven north, and the day of days dawned on the field of Lutzen on November 16, 1632.

A heavy fog enveloped the scene, but as it lifted Gustavus drew up his army and said prayers before them. With bands playing they all sang a great hymn of Luther’s. Then, mounting his horse, the king cried, “God with us!” and the terrible battle began.

It was one of the fiercest struggles in history, and even now its details are imperfectly known, for fog descended during the climax. The tactics of the Lion were brilliantly successful at the outset

Finding the Body of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden after the Battle of Lützen, Carl Wahlbom

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS

and Wallenstein was in danger of rout. He rallied his troops and advanced successfully on the Swedish centre. When a break in the fog permitted him to see what was happening Gustavus led a superb charge of cavalry.

The old Viking crusader spirit blazed up in the king and he outdistanced his men in their victorious advance. He was surrounded by enemies and shot and stabbed to death. When his army heard of the tragedy they bitterly avenged him, and his last fight, although its cost shook the Protestant world with grief and dismay, was a culminating triumph worthy of his fame.

His body was found after the battle, terribly wounded and scarred. His buff jerkin of elkhide was sent to Vienna, and remained there for three hundred years, when, as an acknowledgment of Swedish help to starving Austria, it was forwarded as a gift to Stockholm, to join the collection of relics in the National Museum: the three shirts that he wore, riddled with bullets and swordthrusts, his hose, lace collar and cuffs, pistols, and the rough-haired Swedish charger that he rode, stuffed, and still wearing the embroidered saddle from which he fell on the field of Lutzen.

The Thirty Years War had 16 years to run after his death, but he left an example and an inspiration that heartened the Protestant world; and he lives in history as one of the noblest of Christian knights, insensible to fear, chivalrous, as merciful to the conquered as his enemies were merciless, disinterested and unselfish, a lofty soul armed with the sword of righteousness, one who proved himself to be an unswerving friend and a true lover of his fellowmen.

Carl Linnaeus

1707-1778 A.D., Scandinavia-Sweden

All the world would love a universal language. Linnaeus supplied it for Nature’s own kingdom, for animals and plants. He lives himself in one of the names he gave, that of the Linnaea borealis, a little wild evergreen common to Northern Europe, Asia, and America, and he gave his name to this “little northern plant, long overlooked, depressed, abject, and flowering early,” because it seemed to match the details of his own career. For he, too, was a little northern plant, depressed and abject, flowering early.

He was born at Rashult in Sweden, son of a poor village pastor. The parson’s real name was Ingmarsson Bengtsson, but on going to the university he took the Latinized name of a famous lime tree, and his son Carl was named Linnaeus after him, until ennobled for his work. He took the shorter form of Linné. As Carl Linnaeus, he became a botanist almost as soon as he could walk and talk, for his father had a garden and Carl had an uncle who was a naturalist, and many a wild flower did the boy bring in from the fields and heaths to upset the order of his father’s border.

The parson wished Carl to follow him in the Church, but Carl objected, so his father bound him apprentice to a shoemaker, and few flowers blossomed about a cobbler’s last. Fortunately, Carl’s schoolmaster knew there was something in the lad, and lent him a treatise on botany, took him into his own family, and then enabled him to go to the University of Lund. Carl’s father could allow him only eight pounds a year, and the young student suffered great privation, being so poor that he had

Portrait of Carl Linnaeus, Alexander Roslin

to mend his own shoes with paper and the bark of trees.

His genius attracted the attention of a physician who had a good library and shared Carl’s taste for natural history. Studying his patron’s books and Nature in the open Carl made rapid progress, and won a royal scholarship that took him to Upsala University, where the professor of divinity set him to work describing the plants named in the Bible. His new patron enabled him to take pupils, and so the specter of poverty vanished from the earnest student’s life.

All the men of learning with whom Linnaeus came in contact were impressed by his talents and courage, and when he was only 24 he was appointed to travel in Lapland to observe the natural history and customs of its people. During the summer and autumn Linnaeus made a magnificent expedition, covering more than 3800 miles, nearly all the way on foot, often alone, never richer in escort than a couple of Laplanders to guide and translate for him.

Observing with the instructed ardour of a specialist he underwent terrible privations and was often on the verge of starvation, often so footsore and weary that he could barely crawl at night to his hut or hovel to crave a lodging and a meal. The Lapps marveled at the sight of a man who came out of nowhere, carrying a sword and a gun to protect his life, and a notched staff to measure anything whose size he wished to know; with a little bag that carried too few clothes, but included inkpot and pen, microscope and telescope, a diary, and a mass of paper for drying the plants he collected.

“O wretched man!” cried a woman at whose house he asked for shelter, “what hard fate can have brought you here, to a place never visited by anyone before? Miserable creature, how did you

Table of the Animal Kingdom from Carolus Linnaeus's first edition (1735) of Systema Naturae.

come, and whither will you go?” Well might she ask, for his clothes were muddy and sodden from miles of struggling through marshes, and he was almost dying from exhaustion. All she could give him was a piece of salted reindeer flesh. He ate it ravenously, but was so weak of digestion that it nearly killed him.

At another place all that his hostess could give him was fish over which maggots crawled. Later he was caught in a forest fire with boughs of burned trees suddenly crashing upon him as he made his way. Once a tree fell between him and his guide, a yard from each of them; both men were unhurt. Not until after his death did the world read the story of the great journey that the poor scholar had made, the trials he had endured, and the deadly perils he had succeeded in surmounting. Other travels led him to Holland, where he took his doctor’s degree, and, meeting the immortal Boerhaave, was helped by him to a post that fate seemed all along to have been reserved for him when he was qualified to fill it. He was appointed to the control of the botanical gardens and collections of a scholarly banker, and here Linnaeus began the first of a series of publications that made him lastingly famous and rendered us all his debtors. Not only did he describe and classify his patron’s botanical possessions, he began the great task of reducing the world of plants and animals to a system of rational names and orders.

Linnaea borealis, a flower in Kolari, Finland, named after Carl Linnaeus

Plants and animals had names already, of course, but there was no real order, no enlightened attempt at a system, no grouping of like with like, of collecting species into genera, and genera into the larger, fundamental groups. The system of names employed seems incredible today. Suppose Juliet’s rose had been the dog-rose; its scientific description, translated from Latin into English would have been “the common rose of the woods, with a flesh-colored flower.” All flowers and all animals had titles as clumsy, each isolated from its related kind.

Linnaeus was poor at modern languages, but a master of Latin, and wrote all his works in that tongue. The names that he gave were naturally Latin; he was at home in that language. Moreover, Latin, having been for two thousand years the international language of learning, a name in that language would be understood all over the world where Latin scholarship prevailed. We see that advantage of the system at once when we realize that our names for, let us say, the Lesser Celandine and the Wych Elm mean nothing to a foreigner whereas if we speak of them as Ranuculu sficaria and Ulmus montana all the world knows what we mean.

We still retain our lovely old names for use among ourselves, but different titles are bestowed on flowers and birds and animals in different parts of our own land, so even we need the scientific names as well if we are to identify the species actually meant. America speaks of her robin when she has not got a robin, but we know what she means when we read the scientific name of the bird she wrongly names.

But we needed a system in giving these universal names, and Linnaeus was the man who invented a system. He reduced the names of the genus and the species to two words each, and with masterly powers of summary he contrived to get the character of the animal or growth indicated in each. For example, the generic name of our great cat family is Felis, the Latin name for cat. All the

Statue of Carl Linnaeus in Djurgården, Stockholm, Sweden

cats are grouped under this title with a subordinate word to indicate their character, as Felis leo for lion and Felis tigris for tiger. Under this system we know that America’s so-called mountain lion is not a lion; it is the puma, know to science as Felis concolor, while the American jaguar is Felis onca. Those are the names for these animals all the world can understand.

The making of the system for all known plants and all known forms of animal life was one of the greatest tasks ever undertaken by a laborious mind. And Linnaeus was its author. He reduced Babel to order. Dividing the animal world into six sub-kingdoms, he grouped them as mammals, birds, amphibia (with which he wrongly associated reptiles), fishes, insects, and worms. For every genus and every species he found a name and three fourths of the names he gave remain in use today. The vegetable kingdom he classified by resemblances between one plant and another, in the main by pistils and stamens. And again he named everything, and it remains for our use to this day.

At 31 he settled in Stockholm as a physician. There, in addition to a large practice, he carried on his shoulders, with single assistant, the whole burden of teaching medicine and surgery at the university, while he acted as tutor to students for all parts of Europe. He no longer had to mend boots for a living, for he grew famous and even rich.

Chapter 7  Captain Cook

1729-1779 A.D., South Seas

A half-starved Yorkshire labourer came home one day and found that another child had been born in his two-roomed cottage at Marton in Cleveland. He had nine children in all, and we may imagine that he thought very little of one more. But all the world thinks well of this one now, for his name was James Cook.

This little country, its future greatness all unknown, made little preparation for immortal men. This child who was to find a continent and win it for the British flag had hardly room to be born in. There was no education waiting for him; he must pick up such scraps of knowledge as he could. But there was a good lady who taught him to read, and his father’s master liked him and thought this bright, poor boy worth helping, so he gave James a little schooling, enough to make him a smart shopkeeper’s apprentice in the little fishing village of Staithes, near Whitby.

Then James Cook ran away to sea and became a sailor.

We think of Cook as the explorer of Australia and the founder of British influence in the Southern Dominion, but how often do we remember that he who gave the British Empire a mighty continent played no mean part in giving it also the greatest piece of the American continent that any single Government holds? Cook not only made Australia known, he also helped to conquer Canada. The ship he was in went to Canada on the war with France, and they found him a rare

Captain James Cook, Nathaniel Dance-Holland

sort of man. He was a very clever surveyor, he knew all about tides and currents, and he could find shoals and hidden rocks so well that the admiral came to depend on him. Cook would go out at night alone in a little boat, making notes of the unexplored banks of the St. Lawrence River and the shores of Newfoundland. Once the Red Indians caught him in the St. Lawrence and carried off his boat, but Cook leaped on to an island with his precious notes and charts; and he must have been delighted when he was given £50 for them. They proved to be very helpful in the conquest of Quebec. He went on and on; he mastered Euclid and taught himself astronomy, and he took notes of an eclipse which pleased the Royal Society so much that when Venus was to cross the face of the Sun, and the Government wanted to send an expedition, it was this scientific sailor Cook who was chosen to go out with Sir Joseph Banks, who equipped the vessel, the Endeavour, at his own expense. He sailed to Tahiti, saw the eclipse, and then for three years he explored the Pacific.

It was an unknown ocean. Spain and Portugal and Holland had known it; their imperial fleets had scoured it and exploited it; but they kept the precious knowledge of it to themselves, and since the days of Drake it had been a mysterious sea. Nobody knew of the land that lay beyond it; nobody knew anything about the Australian continent except a few travellers with doubtful tales, and perhaps a few astronomers who are said to have seen the shadow of the continent on the Moon. Cook sailed on and on, with a friend on board in Sir Joseph Banks, one of the best botanists who

HMS ‘Resolution’ and ‘Discovery’ in Tahiti, John Cleveley the Younger

ever strolled through a country lane, and one of the best English patriots who ever gave his services to our race. Many strange sights they saw. They found the sea lit up at nights as if on fire, and Cook thought the light must come from luminous fishes, as, of course, it did. They sailed along the coast of Brazil, where some of their party were nearly frozen to death while seeking plants on a mountain on a summer’s day.

They found and named New Zealand; they sailed right round both islands, astonishing the Maoris, who had been there five hundred years or more, but were cannibals still, and would have eaten Captain Cook and all his crew could they have caught them. In spite of them Captain Cook surveyed New Zealand and took possession of it. In the name of England he set up on a hill two poles carved with the name of the ship and date, and he called together an old chief and his tribe, gave them presents and treated them well, and made them swear never to pull down the flag that he left flying there.

It is a dramatic little scene, this picture of our great sailor appointing a Maori chief as trustee for the British flag, and all the more strange when we think that England did not bother much about the flag for two generations or more. One wonders if they found it flying then!

On to Australia went Captain Cook, to that glorious harbour of Sydney. For ages the long, rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean had swept the lonely continent, the greatest island in the world, but no visitor from the outer world had come to this far place. No white man that we know had been near these ancient haunts of the wild, strange life; not one page of the history of Australia was ready to be written, for the great civilized world knew nothing of it. It was as if the southern world had been asleep.

And yet there was to take place, following on this visit of Captain Cook, a race for Australia, in which England reached the winning-post only just in

“Cook told the Maoris that he had come to set a mark upon their islands,” illustration from An empire story; stories of India and the greater colonies told to children by H. E. Marshall, 1908.

time. Australia, it is true, had been touched at various points by mariners, but they brought back tales of hopeless barrenness, and it was not till Captain Cook sailed to its eastern coast that a white man realized that here was a mighty continent. He was the first man to see the potential wealth of Australia; he was the first to sail the coast, and land, talk with its people, and understand something about them.

He did it all at the peril of his life, and he nearly brought disaster to his crew, for one day in these uncharted waters his ship ran on a hidden rock about 25 miles from land. It stuck fast on the rock, poised on it for two days and nights, and it seemed as if nothing but a miracle could save them in that wild place, on that mysterious coast, with civilization ten thousand miles away and no human help at hand. And a miracle did save them, for at last the ship was lifted off the rock, and what everybody on board expected to happen did not happen. As the water had been coming in it was thought that the ship would sink, but it was saved by the very thing that had seemed to threaten it. A piece of the rock that had pierced its hull snapped off its base and remained in the hole it had made, plugging it tight and saving the ship till it reached home.

But it was not a rare event like that which made this voyage memorable; the great achievement of Captain Cook was that he secured Australia for our race. Yet years were to pass before we took the slightest interest in this vast continent he made known, and Cook had been years in his unknown grave when another British captain followed him and set up the British flag in Australia in the very nick of time to save it from France and Napoleon. A few days after this captain had arrived at Sydney, and as his ships were ready to sail out of the harbour, there sailed in another ship, with La Perouse on board, to take possession of Australia for France. England had found a continent, and France had lost it, by a few brief but precious hours.

A great, brave soul was La Perouse. What emotions must have stirred within him in that fateful hour! He had come to win an empire for his country; he was sailing to his immortality; he was at the gate of his promised land; and it was not for him to win. But he could enter. Captain Phillips and his men gave the great Frenchman a fine reception, and the disappointed explorer was happy among friends. He stayed with them a few weeks and then set out again, but before he left he wrote to the French Government explaining what had happened. Then he left his papers with the English captain, said good-bye, and sailed away with his two ships.

It is one of the tragedies of the world that La Perouse was never seen again. In that dramatic hour he disappeared from history; he must have gone down at sea with all his men.

Captain Cook came home, and not a man in England knew what a glory he had added to the British Empire. There were no triumphal days for this great seaman; his was the pioneering, ours the great reward. He was out again very soon on a voyage to Antarctica, in command of a Government expedition, to discover how far the lands of the Antarctic stretched northward. He did his work, sailing round the great icecap, but he made that voyage memorable by a conquest greater still, for he taught his men how to preserve life and health while they were at sea.

Looking back on all his great achievements Captain Cook believed this hygienic work of his to be the greatest feat of his life. It seemed to him a more stupendous thing than the discovery of Australia. Those were terrible days at sea, when men would die on ships as fast as flies in summer heat. Ships’ crews were broken up and doomed by scurvy and fever, and Cook, who knew more of science than perhaps any English seaman before him, faced this problem like the wise man that he was. He persuaded his men to follow his advice, and trained them by a wise and careful diet to avoid

disease, or, if disease should come, to avert its terror.

There never was a voyage at sea so healthy as Cook’s voyage to Antarctica; only one man died in a crew of over a hundred men; and when the ships came back, and the facts were made known, and Cook’s hygienic science was explained before the Royal Society, the Royal Society gave him its gold medal and honoured him as a benefactor of the race.

So he was. Infinitely more than an explorer was Captain Cook. He set up our flag and established our influence in the greatest territories of our empire, and his name and fame are part of the history of British dominion in America and Australasia. But what can compare with those other two distinctions of this great captain? He taught us how to be healthy at sea; he spread the fame of Englishmen everywhere for chivalry and fair dealing.

They are at the basis of our civilization, these two things. What would the great sea-race have been, where would our far-flung commonwealth have been, if the health of men had not been safe at sea, and if Captain Cook had not made it safe in time to secure the mastery of the sea for the race that most has loved liberty? And as for chivalry, running hand in hand with British freedom everywhere, is it not the very warp and woof which bind our British realms? Captain Cook did nothing ignoble and nothing mean. Never was an explorer more devoted to his men or to humanity, and his treatment of natives opened up golden ways for him.

It was his unbreakable rule to seek entry into new lands with the cooperation of the people he

Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, E. Phillips Fox

found there, to practice every fair means of cultivating their friendship, and to treat natives, wherever he found them, with all possible humanity. He would allow no man to be cruel to a native; he would allow no man to lower the name of England or bring dishonour on the flag; and so firm was he, so relentless was he, in this that once, when some of his crew had been unjust to natives, this English captain called together the natives, and brought out one of his own men and whipped him in the presence of those he had wronged.

His Antarctic voyage safely over, and its work well done, Captain Cook went out again, this time in quest of the North-West Passage to the Pacific; and it was on this third voyage of his that the stern justice of this man led to a tragedy as mournful and pathetic as can be imagined.

Storms drove his ships to Hawaii, where the people thought him a god and would have worshipped him. But there were thieves among them, and this man who whipped an Englishman for wronging natives was not afraid to retaliate when a native wronged an Englishman.

When their best boat was cut from its moorings and taken away he decided that the natives needed a lesson. Four boats he manned with armed men and sent them to form a barricade across the harbour to stop any native boats passing. With two other boats he went ashore, landing with about a dozen men, and leaving the rest in the boats in charge of a lieutenant.

He meant to persuade the king to come on board as hostage till the stolen boat had been returned. His plan was just; but his temper was up and he did not show his usual wisdom in dealing with the natives. The men forming the barricade in the harbour were already firing on native boats as they attempted to pass, and the appearance of the armed men who were with him increased the alarm of the natives. As Captain Cook led their king toward the boats an old woman spread a cloth between them and the sea, crying that the king should not cross it. Cook tried to force him on, whereupon the natives took up pebbles to throw at the man who dared to lay hands on their king. Cook’s temper flared. That these people, whose trust he thought he had, should stone him was enough to make him go against his own policy and open fire on them. A few shots from his gun, and then he seized the king’s arm once more, and would have forced him over the old woman’s cloth and to the boat; but a native standing behind him drew a dagger and plunged it first into his shoulder and then into his heart.

Cook fell, mortally wounded by one of the very iron daggers he had had made after the design of the islanders’ wooden ones and had presented to them. As he fell a mad and seething crowd held him down; and this man who never in his life had wronged a native was beaten and hacked to death, natives snatching daggers from each other’s hands for the satisfaction of striking at him. It was, perhaps, the most horrible death an explorer has ever died, and he was, perhaps, the gentlest explorer who ever put to sea.

Those of the crew who had landed with him now opened fire, and the natives turned on them, killing four and wounding three others. One of the boats pulled in and the men swam out to it; but all this time the lieutenant in charge in the other boat looked on and raised not a finger to rescue his captain’s body or save the men pursued by the natives.

Had not the boats forming the barricade seen from the distance what was happening and themselves opened fire, not one of the men would have got back from that shore alive. The lieutenant was received at home with universal execration, but justice overtook him in the end, for 19 years after he had stood by and watched the murder of Captain Cook he was dismissed from the Navy for cowardice at the Battle of Camperdown. Nelson even thought he ought to have been shot.

Captain Cook’s body was never recovered, though when Captain Clerk, whose ship, the Discovery, accompanied him on this expedition, heard what had happened, he hoped that by making friendly advances to the natives their confidence might be regained and the body of their victim given up. At first the islanders mocked at the suggestion, dancing round in the dead captain’s clothes, but eventually they brought to the ship one or two bones and his right hand. These pitiful remains were buried at sea.

So ended the life of one of England’s noblest men. He was the first of all our seamen to sweep the whole Pacific. He helped to fix the British hold on North America; he founded British Australasia; he put a fifth continent on the map of the world. He surveyed more coastline than any other man. He made unknown waters safe for ships. He explored and settled the mystery of the fabled continent of Antarctica. He taught the race that was to rule the seas how to keep health and strength at sea, and he gave it three million square miles to take care of.

Has any man done more?

1731-1841 A.D., South Seas-Hawaii

Kapiolani was a Hawaiian, as fair as the flowers which strewed her island home. She was of high estate, a friend of the royal house, for her husband was the public orator of Hawaii and the king’s counsellor. She was delicate, too, unused to toil and hardship; but she proved to have that strength and endurance, that utter selflessness, which all women seem capable of when such qualities are needed.

The story of her faith and love is as spectacular as its setting. It is a story of Christianity against a dying paganism; this frail woman against the lurid background of a flaming volcano; the delicate white flower of her faith against the elemental forces of Nature.

Hawaii, one of the loveliest islands in the world, is set like a lily in the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. The salt sea moans around its flower-girt shores, now whispering soft music, at other times terrible with sudden storm.

The Hawaiians were gentle, friendly, as happy as children and as thoughtless. They lived and loved and played, they were beautiful; and all bowed in terror before Pele, the vindictive goddess of the island.

In this lovely group of islands rises Kilauea, one of the biggest and most terrible volcanoes in the world. Its crater is a lake of restless, moving fire, over six miles in circumference. Great black and red rocks are tossed hither and thither, like pebbles in a witch’s cauldron. Over the summit hovers a perpetual vapour lake a gossamer mist, deepening at night to a lurid glow.

Rising up from the crater is a monstrous cliff of cinders and broken lava, now precipitously steep and smooth as a sheet of glass, now rugged and chasmic, where one can climb by perilous paths down to the hard ledge of rock-like lava which bounds the seething lake of liquid fire. Queer stunted little bushes and coarse grasses grow on the mountain-top, and these are spangled with a delicate frost-like tracery formed by the chemical action of the cold air on the mineral vapours rising from the volcano.

It is a fearful and wonderful sight at all times, but in eruption its wild majesty would strike even the most learned men of our civilization with a sense of impotence and awe. It is natural that the wild and primitive people of these islands should have been terror-stricken at this strange

Silhouette of High Chieffess Kapi’olani, Persis G. Taylor

phenomenon, Nature in savage mood, and, fearful of the unknown, should bow down and worship dumbly. As Carlyle says, in a quite other connection: “What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion.”

And so there evolved in the Hawaiian Islands a terrible goddess Pele, who dwelled in the fiery depths of Kilauea. She bathed in the fiery crater, and that was her hair gleaming glass-like in the bushes. The mountain was tabu; only the priests of Pele could live there.

It was especially wrong for a woman to be found there, for Pele, jealous and vindictive, would in revenge shake the island in her fury and destroy the smiling valleys with her fiery streams.

With the progress of civilization the islands around Hawaii became Christianised. Slowly the people gave up their evil practices and forsook their dark superstitions. But still through the years the fear and worship of Pele of Kilauea persisted. Could they not hear her grumbling, and shouting, and holding fierce revelry, shaking the island with her fiendish laughter, belching out her desolating streams in token of her wrath?

Even when the young king forsook paganism and adopted Christianity the priests of Pele still made sacrifice on the sacred mountain, and held the whole nation in fear. Then it was that Kapiolani was inspired to the performance of her wonderful deed of heroism and sacrifice.

She reasoned that if she essayed the difficult ascent up the mountain, and mocked the goddess in her very stronghold, then surely the people would accept Christ without reservation, and the spell of fear which for centuries had been cast over the trembling islanders would at last be broken.

Any man, with a wealth of national culture and civilization behind him would have needed courage to make that ascent; but not only had Kapiolani been born and bred to the worship of Pele, she had to fight in herself the superstitious terror of the former generations of her race who had

Volcano, Kilauea, Island of Hawaii, Jules Tavernier

bowed down to the goddess.

She knew that she was outraging the oldest belief of her old religion, that Pele would evoke terrible vengeance when she found a woman had encroached upon her sacred territory.

She was quite alone. No man dare encourage her, or wish her godspeed: the fear of Pele was too near and recent a thing for that. But Kapiolani loved her people and she loved Christ, so she put aside her trembling fears, and, strong in love and faith, became God’s champion against the superstitious powers of darkness.

She started on her journey. She was a delicate, coast-bred woman unused to hardship and toilsome journeyings. The path was long and torturous, and it led her upward into cold heights which tried her sorely, gently nurtured as she was in a warm climate.

Jutting crags and rocks, slippery glasslike surfaces, and unstable slopes of lava and cinders wounded her delicate feet. Most terrible of all, there were nerveracking rumblings and tremblings. Steam and vapours continually oozed through the burning soil and lava-crevices; and as she neared the summit the lurid light clung round Pele’s Bath, menacing and terrible, like a forest aflame. Only a little while before several men had been overpowered by noxious fumes from the volcano who could gainsay they had been slain by the outrageous goddess!

But Kapiolani climbed on resolutely, trusting in Christ, and clutching in her hand the sacred berries no woman had been allowed to touch.

The furious priests of the goddess Pele came from out their craggy fastnesses and tried to bar her way. But Kapiolani was possessed of a subtle power. Calm and unafraid she pursued her solitary path, and the priests fell back, amazed and powerless before her.

She made her way down the perilous slope of cinders and loose rock to the very edge of the crater, and flung the sacred berries into its fearful, fiery depths.

Then she spoke:

“If I perish by the anger of Pele, then dread her power; but, behold! I defy her wrath. I have

Queen Kapiolani defying the Goddess of the volcano, unknown artist

broken her tabus; I live and am safe, for Jehovah the Almighty is my God.

“His was the breath that kindled these flames; His is the Hand which restrains their fury! Oh! all ye people, behold how vain are the gods of Hawaii, and turn and serve the Lord.”

Kapiolani returned safely to her people, having broken for all time the bonds of superstitious terror which hitherto had bound her trembling nation.

1787-1856 A.D., Asia-Japan

He was one of the sowers of the seed which has ripened into the astonishing transformation of Japan.

Sontoku was born in 1787 and died ten years before the beginning of Japan’s quiet revolution. The name given him by his parents was Kinjiro; his family name was Ninomiya. It was not until after his death that he received the honourable name of Sontoku, which means The Virtuous.

Sontoku, the peasant sage of Japan, comes close to the life of the ordinary people of his country, and his life has been told, his character revealed, his aims and motives laid bare. Through him we may perhaps see some of the elements of character which underlie and explain Japan’s remarkable progress in the last two generations.

Sontoku’s grandfather had collected wealth by hard work and thrift, but the boy’s father gave away or lent his money so freely that his children were brought up in poverty, especially after an overflowing river had covered the ancestral farm with stones and rubbish. The father, too, had such ill-health that he had no means of paying the doctor’s bill except by selling the last of the farms he had inherited. The basis of the Japanese faith is loyalty: to their emperor, to their clan, to their father. To sell the farm would be an act of filial impiety; yet not to pay the doctor was an even greater dishonour to the paternal memory. So he sold the farm. The doctor, however, would not countenance such a sacrifice and refused the money when it was offered to him.

When Sontoku was 14 his father died and the poverty of the family was deepened,

Sontoku, Akiaki Okamoto

though the boy worked for his mother and two younger brothers by gathering firewood on the distant mountains early in the day and plaiting straw rope and making sandals till late in the night. His industry in these ways, and in helping to repair the dykes that guard against floods, was unceasing. Then, when he was 16, his mother died and he had to live with an exacting relative who would not let him have oil for his studies at night. But by cultivating rape-seed on unused ground he made enough money to buy oil for secret reading after the family had gone to bed. By cultivating waste land he eventually grew enough rice to enable him to begin life on his own account, and after much work and hardship he was able to save enough to buy back the family farm.

Sontoku now married and settled down. The head retainer of the chief of his clan, hearing how he had restored his fortunes, sent to ask his assistance as he had ruined himself by falling hopelessly into debt. So Sontoku left his home for five years, took charge of the affairs of the chief retainer, exhorted him to repent and practise self-denial, gained the goodwill of his servants, entirely restored his good fortune, and divided the money he received among the servants.

The chief of the clan, who was also chief adviser to the Military Governor of Japan, had now formed such a high opinion of Sontoku’s ability and unselfishness that he wished to employ him in a high position; but the higher officials looked down on him as a farmer, however clever he might be. So further practical tasks were assigned to him. The first was to reform a district of three villages where the people were poor, idle, lawless, and corrupt. Much money had been spent and wasted on these villages. Sontoku fixed the time for this reform at ten years.

At one time it seemed that failure was threatened, and Sontoku, fearing the fault might be in himself, retired quietly to a temple for three weeks of prayer and fasting. Then the people who had been opposing him were filled with fear lest they should lose his services and petitioned him to return. In the end, as a result of the methods he adopted, the villages became models of industry, happiness, and prosperity, and people from other districts came in throngs to ask for Sontoku’s advice.

By his observation Sontoku also foresaw the coming of a famine and prepared for it, storing grain in readiness, so that when it came he was the means of saving thousands of lives by sending supplies to districts which had been less provident. He also trained in his own methods many of the headmen of villages and retainers of the great lords who managed estates.

Finally, when he was 66 and worn by his labours, having all his life dressed and fed in the simplest peasant fashion and spent all his earnings in helping the poor, he was instructed by the Government to reform the poverty-stricken mountain district of Nikko.

Sontoku knew very well that his strength was insufficient for so great an enterprise, but he undertook it, and for three years taught the people in every village to love one another, to believe in the nobility of work, to improve the irrigation of their fields, and to recover waste lands. Ill, worn out by these labours by day and his constant teachings by night (for many disciples gathered round him), he died, honoured by all, at seventy.

So much for the life of this wise and good man. What were the teachings on which this noble life was based; the teachings that have perpetuated his influence among his people?

Sontoku based his teaching on four principles. First came sincerity: truthful, straightforward dealing, untainted by guile or selfishness. Secondly came industry, the foundation of all honest living. As he expressed it, Heaven and Earth and all Creation are ever at work without repose, and

there is no true place for anyone in the Universe who will not take his share of work. Every man must give something to the world which has given him all he has. We must win on our way and keep it by our labour.

But his third principle was also of vital value to live simply and always below the amount one has earned. This, he pointed out, was the one way to freedom from anxiety about poverty and to provide the means for fresh enterprises, or what we call capital. The true use of dress is for warmth, not for ostentation, and the simplest foods are the most nourishing and conducive to good health. But this, it may be said, is not more than commonplace prudence, and may easily lead to avarice. No; that is securely repelled by the fourth rule of benevolence and human helpfulness: to give away unnecessary possessions in order that they may be utilised in the service of mankind.

Toward this end all the energies of Sontoku’s life were exerted. First came right feeling, sincerity; then training in self-restraint, against sloth and waste; then recognition of the idea that we all live to carry out the Will of Heaven, and can best cooperate with that Will by repaying to mankind all the good with which we have been blessed. This was living according to the Law of Love.

Some people may still say this barely goes beyond a doctrine of economics. But Sontoku’s thoughts rose beyond mere economics. He had a wider view of the government of the Universe, as may be seen in a translation of some of the verses which he composed. For example:

This brief abode of clay

To Him Who framed it and Who rules it still I dedicate, and pray Bless all Thy creatures frail, and guard from ill. The love for one’s own child Which Nature gives to each.

Statue of Ninomiya Sontoku at Hōtoku Ninomiya Shrine in Odawara-shi, Kanagawa

That wider Law of Love

The Path of Right doth teach. In simple faith the fearless mind Yearns for the future still unknown; Doth not the Father of Mankind Reign on His everlasting Throne?

Sontoku expressed his own aims in life in these words: “My wish is to open up the wilderness of men’s hearts, to sow therein the Heaven-given seeds of goodness, to cultivate charity, righteousness, wisdom, and gentleness, and to reap therefrom a harvest of good fruits.”

It was the philosophy of the Peasant Sage of Japan and it will suit us all whether we belong to East or West.

Chapter

10

Adoniram Judson

1788-1850 A.D., Asia-Burma

It was a New Englander who first gave to the Burmese the Bible in their own tongue. In the history of the Christian Church in Burma Adoniram Judson holds the place that Carey has in India. When he sailed from America in 1810, the first of a vast army of missionaries to leave that land, he had no intention of settling in Burma. On his way to London he was captured by a French privateer and imprisoned on board ship and in France. An Englishman discovered him and secured his escape to England by bribing the gaoler. Returning to America he married Ann Haseltine, a brave and gifted woman who was to share in his romantic life in the East; and in 1812 the two set out for India. The East India Company would not let them settle in Calcutta, but they were there long enough to see Carey and his colleagues at Serampore. After some time spent in Mauritius they went to Rangoon in Burma. At that time this city of ten thousand inhabitants consisted of wooden huts and pagodas, dirty and muddy. For a long time Adoniram and Ann toiled at the language. Not till they had spent six years there did they baptise the first Burmese into the Christian religion. When they were able to preach in the open and converts were won they met with much opposition; but things were looking brighter in 1824, when by a royal command they had established themselves at Ava. The interest of the Court was won in part by the medical skill of Dr. Price, who had joined the Judsons and who possessed a galvanic battery which greatly delighted the king. A small house was built for them on the bank of the river. There Ann formed a school, and they settled down, prepared for a peaceful time, with the favour of the Court to secure them a hearing.

Adoniram Judson, unknown artist

But it was not to be for long. War broke out between England and Burma. The Burmese were astonished at the audacity of the white people who dared to challenge their mighty race. At once they began to suspect that these Americans were spies. As the Judsons were preparing for dinner, one day, in rushed an officer with a black book, and with him one who was known to be an executioner. They seized Adoniram and dragged him away to prison. The imprisonment lasted for eleven months.

Ann showed untiring courage in her attempts to see him and to get him food and clothing. After some months she was allowed to build him a little bamboo shed in the prison yard. His sufferings were terrible; he was kept for months with a hundred criminals; and when nearly a year had passed he was carried on a long painful journey to the country prison of Oung-peu-la. All the time Ann was using every means in her power to secure her husband’s release. She followed him to the country prison, the keepers of which were all branded criminals.

Meanwhile the British forces advanced; and the Burmese in their fear, seeking to make peace, had to call upon Dr. Judson to act as interpreter. This led to his release. In after years he recalled as the happiest moment of his life his journey down the River Irrawaddy on a cool moonlight evening with his wife and child, free after 21 months of misery.

When a dinner of great splendour was given to the Burmese who had come to the British camp to make peace the General appeared with a lady on his arm whom the Burmese knew well. It was Ann Judson, whom they had treated with contempt when she had been trying to save her husband. Now they saw the parts reversed. They were astonished and afraid; but she told them, in Burmese, that they need have no fear, she

Ann Hasseltine Judson, Richard Woodman

The Bible in Burmese translated by Judson

and her husband would not seek revenge.

Not long afterwards this gallant woman died of a fever, and her child soon was laid by her side in foreign soil.

For 25 years longer Adoniram laboured for the Christian Faith in Burma. He was a great linguist, and his translation of the Bible into Burmese has been called a perfect work. He lived long enough to see a great church arise. In the spring of 1850 he was ordered a sea voyage for his health, but a few days after the boat sailed he died and was buried at sea.

The Seizure and Binding of the Missionaries, engraving by Joseph Austin Benwell

He was the Franklin of Australia, who went out into the unknown southern desert and was seen and heard no more. Where he lies no man knows nor ever can tell. About 90 years ago he set out on his third and last expedition with the all too venturesome ambition of subduing the desert interior of the continent and crossing it from east to west. He had already placed thousands of its untracked square miles on the map, discovering new rivers and ranges in the Northern Territory and bursting his way, although all too slenderly equipped, almost to the point where Cape York stands up like a pinnacle on one side of the Gulf of Carpentaria That exploit alone was sufficient to give him a place among the leaders of Australian exploration.

His daring journey, and even more his unexpected return when he had been given up for lost, roused every Australian of those days to a high pitch of enthusiasm. He was himself no less exalted by his success, and set out on a second expedition and on a third with boundless confidence. Neither venture fulfilled his hopes; the second was bogged in failure, the third was a tragedy that stirred men’s hearts more than his triumph.

For each and all of them his best equipment was his boundless enthusiasm and confidence in his powers. Others might shake their heads and say he was no bush-man, that he lacked the necessary instinct for finding his way among the trackless, featureless bush of Australia where men may wander for days in circles, because there are no landmarks, and so perish at last from hunger and

1813-1848 A.D., South Seas-Australia

Ludwig Leichhardt, unknown artist

thirst. Lacking too in him was that indefinable quality of all explorers which may be simply defined as the ability to take care of themselves in the face of dangers and difficulties known and unknown. If he was conscious of these defects in himself, he was determined to ignore them because he had the brand of courage that declines to admit the impossible.

He was by training and education a man of science, a naturalist who in other circumstances or under the guidance of other explorers would have been admirably employed in collecting specimens. Such was the task he set himself, and in estimating the contribution of his career to Australia it is certain that his collection of natural history specimens were of the very highest value. But in all expeditions their scientific contributions take a place in men’s minds far below the fascination of discovery of unknown places. So we may think it was with Leichhardt himself. His scientific curiosity was subdued to his thirst for exploration and to his desire to be the first to set foot where none had been before.

Fortune favoured his first strange romantic venture, giving him what the envious called beginner’s luck. He came, a German student, to New South Wales in 1841, and after some botanical excursions entirely in keeping with his previous training and education he travelled overland to Moreton Bay, near Brisbane, and there began to fit himself to become an explorer by making short, unaccompanied journeys into the Queensland bush.

The idea of exploration in Australia was in the air; there were so many vast regions unmapped in nearly every State. The path through the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, a tourist centre now and almost a country resort of Sydney people, had been found only 30 years before. The interior of the continent was more untraversed than the Sahara is today. Everywhere new regions beckoned. The call appealed strongly to the German student. An expedition up through northern Queensland to the western edge of Australia had been mooted; Leichhardt hoped to go with it as naturalist. The project hung fire and, impatient of delay, Leichhardt resolved to go by himself.

He received very little encouragement; but eking out his own slender resources by means of gifts from others, both in money and in stock, he managed to get a party together. On October 1, 1844, he set out from a sheep-station on the Darling Downs on the trip that made his name as an explorer. Considering the importance of the undertaking his party was pitifully small. He had with him six white and two black men, 17 horses, 16 head of cattle, and four kangaroo dogs, and his supply of provisions was equally meagre.

He had to take a longer and more round-about route than had been planned because his little party would be safer if it kept to the well-watered lands of the coast. Leaving the Condamine River, north of the Darling Downs, he crossed the northern water-shed and struck one of the main tributaries of the Fitzroy River which empties itself into the Coral Sea. He named it the Dawson, and, passing northward and westward, found and named other smaller streams of the Planet and the Comet, then the Mackenzie River, and crossed another watershed.

Following one of its downward flowing streams the party came to the Burdekin River, Leichhardt’s most important discovery, and, pursuing their way still northward, came by way of the Valley of Lagoons to the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Here they struck too far north toward Cape York and had to come back. It was the beginning of misfortunes. Up to this time they had been so little troubled with Natives that they had ceased to think of them as hostile. This fancied immunity was tragically broken on a night of June some nine months after they had set out.

The party were peacefully encamped by a chain of shallow lagoons and the naturalist Dr. Gilbert was planting a few lilies he had gathered, as was his nightly habit when he had come on any flowers. Suddenly a shower of spears was thrown among the unarmed men. Poor Gilbert was almost instantly killed; two others of the white men were seriously wounded. Leichhardt and the others rushed for their guns, but so unprepared were they for what had happened that not a gun was capped and it was some time before they could fire a volley to put their assailants to flight.

They buried Gilbert where he had fallen; they left the grave unmarked, building above it a large fire to hide all traces of it from the Natives. That act alone suffices to tell the nature of their peril. Years afterwards the place was found and the river running by it bears the name of Gilbert. They went on, hugging the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, moving very slowly on account of the two wounded men. With fast-dwindling supplies, lagging footsteps, and hearts cast down they found their way to the southwest corner of the gulf.

There another misfortune awaited them, for four of their horses were drowned in the boggy banks of the Roper River; and as Leichhardt’s botanical collection could no longer be carried it had to be abandoned. At long last the worn-out travellers, nearly destitute of everything, reached the settlement of Victoria at Port Essington 14 months after they had started. News travelled slowly in those days, and when Leichhardt arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in Sydney he was welcomed

Illustration from Reminiscences of Australia, with hints on the squatters’ life, by Christopher Pemberton Hodgson, 1846

as one risen from the dead. He wrote in his imperfect English some account of his arrival:

“We did come to Sydney, it was quite dark; we did go ashore, and then I thought to see my dear friend Lynd. So I went up George Street to the barracks. And then I went to his quarters to his window. He was dressing himself; I did put in my head; he did jump out of the other window and I stood there wondering. Soon many people did come round, and did look, Oh, so timid! And there was such a greeting. I was dead, and was alive again. I was lost, and was found.”

The expedition, successful as it was in opening up such a large area of well-watered country, was everywhere acclaimed, and was the more enthusiastically praised because of the untried leader who had accomplished it. Leichhardt became the hero of the hour, poets gushed into song in the newspapers, a more substantial reward was offered by public and private subscriptions.

Thus encouraged, Leichhardt was fired with the ambitious idea of traversing the continent from the eastern to the western shore, keeping as far as possible on the same parallel of latitude.

The Australians inaugurated an expedition of seven white men and two Natives, with hundreds of goats and sheep and cattle, 15 horses, and 13 mules. There were besides an ample outfit and provisions calculated to last the explorers on a two-years journey.

The expedition which started under such favourable conditions exactly reversed Leichhardt’s previous experience of good fortune. It was a failure almost from the beginning. Instead of starting low down, and straight across from the Condamine River, he decided to strike north through the country he knew, with some idea of gathering help from semi-tropical conditions instead of striking desert areas more quickly. Whatever the plan it proved mistaken. The party were caught by the wet season and the monsoon rains; they were hemmed in by mud and bog. They lost their stock, consumed their provisions, and made no progress. Henceforth the narrative is one of semi-starvation and sickness, and in all too short a time they had to return utterly defeated to the station on the Condamine River.

Leichhardt was neither disposed to accept failure nor to believe that the cause of it lay in himself. He began to prepare for another expedition, still persisting and believing in his capability to lead one across the continent, and fearful only that he might be forestalled. He strove desperately to organise another party and at last succeeded in getting one together. It was neither so well provided nor so large, nor comprised of such capable men as those who had accompanied him in his failure. But he was wild to start.

Start he did, with five white men beside himself and two Natives, and with a smaller equipment of stock than had accompanied his previous failure. More improvidently still he took what seems to have been a totally inadequate supply of provisions. In March he set out; the last letter ever received from him bore the date of April 3, 1848, speaking of the country he had passed through and saying nothing of the way he meant to go. No one knew whither he had gone, no vestige of himself or his companions was ever found; they were as if they had never been. Stranger still, even the mules and horses and goats were never again heard of, even by report. The disappearance of every vestige of the expedition is one of the strangest mysteries of Australia’s mysterious interior. We may surmise that all died singly and alone.

It is a desperate picture, that of these poor stragglers dying solitary in the waste, and the story of Leichhardt’s ending is sadder because of the alluring brightness of his first success. But nothing can dim the brilliance of what he did, or of his own indomitable spirit.

Chapter 12  Hudson Taylor

1833-1905 A.D., Asia-China

Hudson Taylor was born in Barnsley and lived to be 72. During his life he travelled eleven times to China at first in the slow sailing ships. In all he spent 27 years in the East, and during the rest of his life he travelled about the world making the needs of China known.

He was a great friend of China, but he is best remembered as “a man who believed God” and sought to make Him known everywhere he went. If he had sent traders or soldiers into China, a great scholar said, he would have been known by everyone; but he sent evangelists, and that was a nobler service.

Hudson Taylor was trained as a doctor in a hard school, had from the beginning courage and grit, and he schooled himself to do without things. At Hull and in London he studied medicine. Once while he was dissecting a body in the London Hospital he poisoned his finger. The surgeon told him to drive home in a hansom at full speed, for he was a dead man.

But Taylor had no money for a hansom, so he set out to walk the four miles home. He had already in his mind to go to China, and as he walked, with increasing weakness, he became sure, whatever the surgeon had said, that he would live. For weeks his life hung in the balance, but he recovered. When all the obstacles had been overcome this youth of 21 set sail for China in 1853.

Image from The Story of The China Inland Mission by Mary Geraldine Guinness, 1893

China was not a peaceful land in those days. The great Taiping Rebellion, which General Gordon was to crush, was in full strength. From 1856 to 1860 the second Opium War was being waged between China and Britain, and the English who dwelled in the Chinese seaports were liable to insult and violence. The young doctor-preacher had many dangers to overcome. Once with a companion he came to the city of Tungchow. They had heard rumours that they might be attacked, but Taylor was not a man to be easily turned back. As the two travellers reached the city gate a Chinese seized Hudson by the hair and almost choked him. Some were for dragging the foreigners to the Mandarin, some for killing them on the spot. After a time they decided to take them to the chief official.

This man happened to know that it was not prudent to ill-treat foreigners; he listened to their message and accepted a copy of the New Testament. He even allowed them, battered and bruised as they were, to distribute their books before they left the city.

It was not an easy task to preach under these conditions. But Taylor kept on. He practised medicine and preached in Swatow and Shanghai and Ningpo; and during this first term he was preparing for what became his life-work, the foundation of the China Inland Mission.

He came back to England to study medicine. One Sunday, while he was at Brighton, he stood on the Front watching the crowds going to church, and thought of China and the millions there who had no voice to speak to them of Christianity.

He had a great struggle on the Brighton beach that day, but when it was over he was at peace. The rest of his life was devoted to sending to China a growing company of evangelists. His faith was like a pure flame, and everywhere he went men and women saw some of the things which he saw, and were ready to help him. He believed that God had called him to do this thing, and he trusted

Hudson Taylor alone at night is searched by a thief, illustration from Hudson Taylor: The Man Who Dared by Marshall Broomhall, 1920

that He would see him through.

Before he died he had seen many hundreds of helpers go into the heart of China. He lives in the history of the China Inland Mission, not only as a great missionary statesman, but also as a great man of faith.

Hudson Taylor grave headstone, Xuande church in Zhenjiang, China

Chapter 13  Lawrence Hargrave

1850-1915 A.D., South Seas-Australia

He was one of those who, sleeping far away from the noise of the world in quiet little acres of God, did great things before they slept, left the world much richer than they found it, and are now forgot.

He lies far away at the southern bounds of our English-speaking world, in a corner of a graveyard in Sydney; but no pilgrim visits this place. Yet every boy who sees a box kite tugging at the string should have a thought for Lawrence Hargrave, for he invented that kite while he was searching of the secret of the flight of birds. His box kite was not a toy to him; it instructed him in the rush of air beneath the planes, it told him of the mysteries of balance. He looked at it as it was floating in the sky and law a vision of the aeroplane.

For a little time, men listened to him, and even applauded him. Those who had vision, like himself, borrowed his ideas and turned them to account. The way to the conquest of the air was long and hard and perilous, and Hargrave travelled it alone. At last he fell out of the race discouraged; and, though he lived to see aeroplanes darting through the sky, they were not his planes. When he died, in the early days of the Great War, a friend who lamented the neglect of him by the Australian Government said he had died of a broken heart. Looking up into the sky one day, Lawrence Hargrave saw a boy’s kite flying, as other men had seen before him. But he saw what other men had not seen he saw what the string attached to the

Photograph of Lawrence Hargrave

middle of the kite did for it, always keeping it at such an angle that the air current pressing against it pushed it upwards and supported it. He saw that the flat plane of the face of the kite was balanced on the string almost as if the string were a pole and the kite hinged on it.

From that he went on to the idea of having twin kites side by side with a bar joining them, and the string tied to the middle of the bar. The wind playing against one kite would bounce off against the other and help to uplift it; but the two kites, if balanced, would counteract any tendency in either of them to duck. They would lift one another, and a larger surface for the wind to support could be used.

It was an idea which was almost an inspiration; and it is certain that no single plane kite surface ever had the same uplifting power as these twin kites. In order to catch all the wind pressure he could he made his twin kites something after the pattern of the boxes used for sending eggs by post cardboard boxes with square cells in them. Hargrave made his first box kites with six cells in each, and then joined these big boxes by a bar and sent them up. Later he found that he could do

Photograph of Hargrave and Swain demonstrating how the man-lift was achieved

without the cell compartments, and finally it was seen that the box kites could be brought closer and closer together till they touched, and the bar joining them could be abolished, and still the kites would balance. When Hargrave arrived at that point he saw (and was the first to see) that an aeroplane could be built to go through the air, in part supported by the air, and would be balanced like a box kite. The first biplanes were variations of the box-kite model to be made.

He showed his box-plane kites to everybody who would look at them as long ago as 1893. He took them to America, and those were the happiest days of Hargrave’s life, for he found himself recognised and applauded. But when he went back to his own country he found that his work was thought of only as a sort of scientific curiosity. There were no businessmen to help him to go on with those experiments in flight to which his mind always turned, and of which the box kites were only the beginning. But, though only a part of the flying machines that were to come, the box-kite principle was indispensable in the first of the successful flying machines.

The first men to make a practical flying machine that would go over a mile were the Wrights, and one of the brothers acknowledged how much he had learned from studying the models of Hargrave. But there is another witness of the debt the world owes to him. The Wrights learned a great deal about the construction of their first gliders from Octave Chanute, a Frenchman in America, and from Mr. A. M. Herring, for whom Chanute designed a glider. This glider was the ancestor of the modern biplane in the way in which the two plane surfaces are braced, and it grew out of the double box kite. The first glider on which the Wright brothers practised also shows the same box-kite idea and construction.

If Hargrave had done nothing else the idea of the box kite puts him among those who, if they never flew their own machines, supplied the thought which enabled other men to do so. He improved his kites till they would lift, when several were joined together in tandem, as much as 360 pounds, and thus they became man-lifting kites, and could be used to hoist an observer high up above the hills and fields.

Though the box kite was one of the steps upward in conquering the air, and though its structure can be seen in all the first flying machines, the ideas most precious to Hargrave were not those of sustaining planes in the air, but of getting them there. He wanted to lift them. Nine years before his box kite flew he sent in his first paper on flight to the Royal Society of New South Wales, where a few scientific men read and forgot it. It was in 1884, and the essay had the idea that the flapping of a bird’s wing in the air, like the spiral motion of an eel in swimming, produces eddies, which in the air thrust the bird upwards or in the water push the eel along. Hargrave had the dream that someone might some day make a flying machine which would imitate the flapping motion of a bird’s wings and support itself.

He tested his ideas by making a number of small flapping-wing machines, with wings that were curved into the shape of his planes. They were beautiful models, and he started the wings on their flapping with elastic bands wound tightly round a drum which these mechanical birds carried. One of his models flew 200 feet. A little later, still struggling in this rather hopeless quest of a flying-bird machine, he designed a small compressed-air engine to make the wings flap, and flew the model for still longer distances. It was while he was struggling with these models that he hit on his idea of the box-like arrangement of planes; but he became sadly convinced that the birds could never truly be imitated in their flight.

They were living machines, beyond man’s power to make; and he must seek the impulse of flight in another way. We know now where he found it. The difficulty, as all the pioneers of the air found, was to make a machine powerful enough to make eddies in the air which would lift plane and engine too. This problem was solved only when the explosion-motor served by petrol was invented. But it came too late for Hargrave. Other air-pioneers seized on it to lift their planes before such a thing had been seen in Sydney. At the same time Hargrave’s inventive genius had sailed on another tack which, as before, led him to no personal triumph, though it anticipated inventions which were practical successes in other men’s hands. He saw that nothing would ever be done without lightness joined to power in the driving engine. He thought out a model rotary engine. He would have, he said, a three-cylinder screw engine so made that the base of the propeller was an engine and the cylinders could revolve on the crank shaft. The pin through the crank shaft would be stationary, and the thrust would come on the valve face. Here was the germ of the famous French Gnome engine introduced in 1909. The Gnome engine, with its group or double group of cylinders, is a very different thing from Hargrave’s model, which weighed less than eight ounces and made 456 revolutions a minute; but the root idea is the same. Hargrave’s models, after they had been refused house-room by the New South Wales Government in 1910, were sent to Munich, where they are now housed in a museum in that city. We count him among the men who made flight possible for men, and who, having an idea, persisted in it till it made its way though all the world should pass him by.

Lawrence Hargrave Memorial, Stanwell Tops, New South Wales, Australia

Robert Edwin Peary

1856-1920 A.D., Explorers

He was the man who refused to fail. Single-minded in his ambition to reach the Pole, he persevered in the face of almost overpowering difficulties, with slender resources, in the face of failure after failure; his life was given in the cumulative effort to succeed.

His success was independent of modern methods of travel; it was attained by the efforts of human mind and body alone, he might have reached his goal with the application of the same gifts of will and hardihood a century or even two centuries before, had he been living when Hudson sailed to find the North-West Passage, or a century earlier, when the Arctic voyage of John Davis discovered the Davis Strait.

His early training was that of a surveyor in the United States Navy. He was employed by his chiefs not as a sailor but as an engineer; his work took him to unmapped solitudes and to the survey of untrodden lands. Among them was the region of Nicaragua, then thought to be a possible area for the cutting, afterwards abandoned for Panama, of a canal across the isthmus between North and South America. Few would have expected then that this hardy and rather lonely naval engineer would carve his name as a great Arctic explorer, the first man to set foot on that mysterious and almost mystic part of the globe,

Pole.

the North

Photograph of Robert Peary

It has even still an indescribable fascination, though the aeroplane and the airship have brought it within the reach of expeditions endowed with sufficient funds and capacity. In Peary's day the problem was of an entirely different kind. The North Pole, unlike that of the South, is not on continental land but on a frozen Polar ocean, the way to it on the last stages being on uneven and treacherous hummocks of ice; none can tell beforehand what perilous crevasses may loom in the path.

These appalling difficulties had extinguished effort after effort for a hundred years; they had taken a toll of the lives of some of the bravest and most daring of men. Nevertheless always, human nature being what it is, the hope and effort continued; and when once a mariner had sailed into these silent seas the desire to go back to them was overwhelming. With some small effort of imagination we can realise now the thrill that went through the minds of Arctic explorers of Great Britain or Scandinavia or America when they heard that one of their number had made another step forward or had reached another parallel in those high latitudes.

Every device of the Arctic explorer’s ingenuity was employed to attain a few more painfully won miles on the quest, some striving to get nearer by adopting a new point of departure, some by traversing old routes at different times and seasons, and Nansen, after long and expert consideration, in the hope of drifting across the Pole in the Fram. When it was announced that the explorer of the Fram had reached the 86th parallel every Arctic explorer in the world was stirred with a shock of envy and the desire for emulation.

To one man whose passion was the Arctic it served as a spur. Peary’s eyes had been turned to the Pole for many years. The desire had been kindled in him when he became interested in Nordenskiold’s journey on the inland ice of Greenland in 1886. He returned from that expedition determined to explore the icecap of Greenland in its least known parts. By a decision for which the world cannot be too grateful the United States naval chiefs let him go. So now behold him dispatched on his quest, resolute never to abandon it while life and energy remained to him. He was a poor man, he had few friends in high places, he was hardly of the temperament to make more; but

Photograph of Peary Sledge Party and Flags at the Pole

behind and above all he had his unconquerable will. He had also what we can now see to be the insight of genius; pursuing from the first the only way in which the journey could be accomplished, and pursuing it in the face of every disappointment and rebuff. Described in the simplest words, the plan as he developed it with his accumulated knowledge was this: it was to take a contingent of young Eskimos and place them at the farthest point North accessible by sea; they were to become a normal settlement with their own families and pursuits.

From them a second settlement was to be drafted and sent as far North as the land extended; from this second settlement the march would be undertaken with Eskimos, dogs, and sledges over the ice to the Pole. A favourable opportunity would have to be awaited for the last dash, and the successive stages of the march would be made by overlapping bands until they came within striking distance. At a favourable opportunity the explorer would go forward with the last few of his best men and dogs, taking his own life and others in his hands.

This was the plan; for its execution qualities were necessary such as many who admired Peary most and believed in him wholly had not fully realised. With the passing of the years the enormous preliminary work that he did has faded from recollection. He was by no means merely a strong man who by sheer force of an iron constitution and iron will drove through every obstacle to the Pole. He reached it chiefly because he spent nearly 25 years in eliminating obstacles that for four centuries had prevented other explorers from doing what he at last succeeded in doing.

The main thing that made his feat possible was the placing of a ship at the north of Greenland on the shores of the Polar Sea; in this way both dogs and men could set out early in the spring of the year and travel directly across the polar ice without preliminary struggle. Peary arrived at this necessary condition by studying ice conditions from Cape Sabine to Cape Sheridan, a stretch of several hundred miles along the Ellesmere coast and Grinnell Land. He struggled up and down this coast for four years, he learned every inch of the ice barrier, saw it at all seasons of the year, and knew the exact condition of ice and sea. He found that a particular choked passage loosened up as a result of tide and temperature.

The land was by no means always open: his last ship, the Roosevelt, got jammed in it, but his long and painful experience had taught him how to evade the grip even of the pack ice.

For the accomplishment of his plans he had to use Eskimos, and he had to become one himself. He could dress and eat and travel like an Eskimo; he used to disappear with a few sledges and stay away for many weeks. He did not mind rotten meat any more than low temperatures, and he could out-walk the best hunter in the tribe. In becoming like the Eskimos he had won their confidence.

The complete story of his long struggle: his failures, his renewed attempts, his final triumph is one of the epics of human endeavour. We cannot tell it all, or even the whole story of the four terrible years he spent in Ellesmere Land between 1898 and 1902 when he set out in the ship given by Lord Northcliffe, the Windward, with Captain Robert Bartlett. But something we can tell. On his way to his first land base 200 miles from the ship he started out with four teams and four Eskimos one day in December when the thermometer was 50 degrees below zero. Bartlett tells the story:

A month passed and Peary had not returned. Two of his Eskimos gave up in the middle of the blizzard; when the other two went forward he realised that the two behind might be lost so he turned round, went back, and found them. He saved their lives and started there toward the land base at Fort Conger. But when he reached there he was exhausted and both his legs were frozen to the

knee. He stayed there in a little wooden shack while his knee grew worse and worse.

Bartlett says he could hardly believe how a man could have stood the agony of what he went through. At last he had himself lashed on a sledge and started back; and when he at length reached the ship, enduring the suffering of the bumping over the ice without a murmur, he had to be carried up the gangway. He lost his toes, and it was a long time before he could hobble about on crutches. But early in May the cripple left his ship and was out over the icecap again. Bartlett once asked him how he could stand it. He only said: “One can get used to anything, Bartlett.”

We may recall briefly some of the things he had done in the years before his self-appointed task was fulfilled. He had spent periods extending to more than one year and again to more than two years in North Greenland among the Eskimos. He had studied them and formed friendships with every member of the tribe.

He had shown that Greenland was an island, second largest in the world. He had brought back from Cape York, in 1897, a 90-ton meteoric iron discovered many years before by Sir James Ross. The feat proved that in becoming an explorer Peary had not ceased to be a capable engineer. He had reached on successive voyages the 84th parallel in the Windward in 1902 and the latitude of 87° in the Roosevelt in 1906.

Then in the spring of 1909 Peary, driving ever farther and farther forward, approached his jumping-off place. His captain describes how he came into the camp, and the two climbed the hill behind the ice huts to see how the sea ice looked. Peary said little: his companion thought he knew that this was his last try of a lifetime spent in the fight for the goal. The weeks went on, the advanced party had reached and passed the 87th parallel; there were less than 175 miles of ice between the explorer and the Pole.

On the first day of April Peary bade Goodbye. He had 40 dogs, four undamaged sledges, and his four best Eskimos as well as his coloured body-servant Henson, who had been with him for so long. “Goodbye, Captain,” he said to Bartlett, “take care of yourself; don’t worry about me I’ll be back.” Then he went forward, fortune favouring him at last, for the ice seemed to be in a good condition; there were no breaks of water and the weather was cold but clear. He reached the Pole on April 6, 1909; he got back from it and, following Bartlett, rejoined him again in the Roosevelt on April 27. That is the story. It is a plain tale, and those who are best fitted to judge of the circumstances

Photograph of Marie Peary, daughter of Robert E. Peary

are convinced that the feat was accomplished, though Peary on the eve of his triumphs had done the one thing that in the opinion of many marred it. He might have taken Bartlett who, a white man like himself, would have been the complete and unshakable witness of the certainty of his arrival at the Pole. He took, instead, the coloured man Henson, who had no pretensions either as an explorer or as a navigator, faithful servant though he was.

The right answer to the criticisms that followed Peary’s return, and were made freely by his own countrymen though not by British authorities on Arctic exploration, was afforded by Bartlett himself. That sturdy friend and companion declared that Peary was quite right to take Henson instead of himself, because Henson was a better dog-driver. If Peary had not reached the Pole the four Eskimos, members of a race that cannot keep a secret, would certainly have declared the truth. But Peary was incapable of falsehood as he was unlikely to have made any mistake in taking the observations which were necessary to substantiate his arrival at the North Pole. If Bartlett believed, we believe. It was our good fortune once to see Peary and hear him, when the Royal Geographies

Photograph of Josephine Diebitsch Peary, wife of Admiral Robert E. Peary, with their children: Marie Ahnighito Peary and Robert E. Peary, Jr.

Society of Great Britain, which examined his observations, his diaries, his records and endorsed his claim, bestowed on him its Gold Medal. He was a tall, strong rugged man with rather a harsh voice and an intonation more fitted for the crisp language of command than for that of persuasion; but on that occasion, when geographers whose opinion he valued most met to do him honour, something in him softened, and the hard outlines of his face broke into a smile which revealed beneath the outward expression of the conqueror’s resolution something of the simple gladness of a simple man.

Chapter 15  Mrs. Daisy Bates

1859-1951 A.D., South Seas-Australia

No other woman has done what she had done. She is one of the most courageous and remarkable women in the world. For over a generation she has been helping the most primitive race still left on Earth, the Aborigines of Australia; for over 20 years she had been living alone in a tent among them.

She is a woman of a noble spirit, great ability, and much independence of mind. She has a passionate love of England and all its scenes and sounds and quiet restfulness; yet with sublime selfsacrifice she had given up her country and all the rest of the world’s enjoyments to help the most backward fragment of the human race, still in a state of savagery and recurrent cannibalism. She is no longer young enough or strong enough to do without the comforts of civilization, but there she is, still in her tent on the rim of the great Nullarbor Plain, alone and unafraid. Far and wide the natives know of her, and to her they come when they are ill or in want. She knows their languages, their rituals, their inherited traditions, their capacities and incapacities, better than anyone else in the world. She is convinced that theirs is a vanishing race, a people of the Past with no Future, yet she stays on to ease their Present and to act as a buffer between them and their first contact with civilization.

In 1889 she left her work as a journalist on the staff of W. T. Stead to live with her husband on a cattle station in Western Australia. The daughter of a sporting Irish family, she was well equipped for life in the outbacks, but from the first she was much besides a

Photograph of Daisy Bates

rancher with cattle counted by the thousand; she was a scientist, a keen observer, and a student with a capacity for languages. The problem of the Aborigines, the contact of Stone Age Man with our 20th-century civilization, enthralled her. She picked up many of the dialects spoken by the constantly moving tribes, and obtained a knowledge of this black race, and eventually an influence over the wanderers which seemed to them like magic.

In 1904 she was invited by the Government of Western Australia to write a history of the native tribes, and for eight years she visited every town and settlement and district where a group of natives could be found. Wherever she went she found their numbers decreasing. There was no cruelty on the part of the white man, but it was impossible for the two races to live side by side. The white pioneers fenced in their farms and homes, and in fencing them in barred off the old native tracks which led from waterhole or river to the ground they had owned since time immemorial. The white man ploughed up the roots that had been their food, the native birds and animals began to decline; the black men, born hunters, could not take to agriculture, and soon they were lying down and dying.

In 1910 she went on a special Commission to observe the hospital treatment of sick and diseased Aborigines on the islands of Dorre and Bernier, which had been set on one side for this purpose, Dorre for men, Bernier Island for women.

A wild sea raced between the mainland and the islands, and the terrified natives who were being taken to hospital were almost mad with fear and sea-sickness. It was typical of Mrs. Bates that though she, too, was suffering from violent sea-sickness she felt she must do something to calm them. Remembering Mark Tapley in the old screw immigrant ship, she crawled over to the hold where the black men lay and let them see her in the same distress. Many of them already knew and trusted her, and their terror subsided.

It was at these island hospitals that she learned the futility of trying to treat the primitive people in the same way as civilized ones. There was a skilled surgeon and there were trained nurses. The patients were well fed, warmed, clothed, and tended with the utmost sympathy and goodwill. Yet one after the other they died, losing heart and even the will to live in this strange clean world, away from their own people. During the months Mrs. Bates was on the islands she set up a post office between the patients and their families on the mainland. The letters were notched little sticks with primitive man’s messages. Each sender would tell her what the message was, and when she gave up the letter she would hear the message confirmed by the receiver. Their joy in these letter-sticks was pathetic.

Sometimes as she sat by a sick-bed she would learn the end of some tribal story whose beginning she had heard in a far-off inland camp. When rain was wanted she would join with them in singing the rain song of the rain totem groups. She learned that a sick native must be kept tranquil and

Photograph of Jack Bates, husband of Daisy Bates

happy. The invalid must not be worried, fussed, bathed, or washed if it irritated him. Some time later, when these island hospitals had been abandoned, Mrs. Bates was able to put her ideas into practice. An epidemic of measles struck the town of Katanning, near one of her camps, and the infection was brought to the camp. She had forty patients, men, women, and children, on her hands, and she pulled every one through. She left them in their own bush shelters and kept them tranquil and cheerful. If Ngoong’ula wanted to visit No’tuman to have a little gossip, she wrapped a blanket round her and took her along; and if Weerijan wanted a white nightgown to “make her better” she got the white nightgown and was better. She made up songs about emus and kangaroos taking medicine; she made them laugh at each other, and they recovered.

Her book was finished in 1912, with Dr. Andrew Lang’s revisions, but a new Government came into power and would not undertake its publication. The manuscript was returned to her to publish at her own expense, but by that time she had realised the dire need of the surviving groups for her constant help. She decided that the only way to help this dying race was to camp among them, tend their sick and feeble, urge them to keep their own laws, and protect them as far as possible from themselves and the occasional white who were far from being the highest representatives of civilisation.

Her husband having died, she sold her station and travelled wherever she heard of natives gathering. At Eucla in the southeast corner of Western Australia she nursed the last of a once big Eucla group. At Ooldea, in South Australia, the last man of another large group died in her arms.

The year the war drums started rolling in Europe she came into South Australia from Eucla, travelling by camel buggy across the southern edge of the Great Nullarbor Plain. Five times she pitched her camp along the edge of this Plain which no man, white or black, had dared to cross till Edward John Eyre made the journey with infinite toil and danger in 1840. Her fifth camping ground

Daisy Bates, Gauera, Balgundera and the buggy before taking of crossing the Nullarbor Plain

was Ooldea, which she reached in 1917 and has never left. She stopped her camel cart here because Ooldea, a mile from the great railway linking South and Western Australia, would provide her with permanent water and was a centre frequented from time immemorial by the restlessly wandering Aboriginal tribes, which still come here from far north of the Great Plain never to return to their own waters.

She has lived here 17 years in a tent and a bough shed encircled by a high breakwind. She must walk a mile to get water and carry it a mile home, though she is now nearly 70. Some of this water is always put out for the little finches and other birds whose chattering and splashing cheer her solitude. Sometimes the thermometer registers 112 in her tent. A year or two ago she was so ill that she thought she was going to die, and there was no one to nurse her. Day after day she got up to make her bed and her tea, and then she went to bed again, too feeble for more. The Governor-General went by in a train at the time and sent a message, as other holders of the office had done before, asking her to be at the station to meet him, but she was too ill to go. Ever in her memory are the sights and sounds of England, the primroses and the church bells, velvet lawns and the song of birds; but still she goes on labouring in solitude, in a climate often parching and only rarely bursting into beauty when the first rains bring colour like dawn to the dry earth.

She keeps a revolver, for she knows the danger from groups run wild. Once there came to her tent a woman who had eaten her own baby, for cannibalism still breaks out occasionally among these people, and Mrs. Bates is at the lowest and wildest end of the Aborigines question. A mountain has been called by her name, but she is more pleased with the name the natives have for her. To them she is Kabbarli, the Grandmother, as stern sometimes as Mother Nature herself, for she does not believe in giving a healthy young native a bit of food or a scrap of cloth.

“You must hunt or work if you would live,” she will say to such a one. But she feeds the children and some of the women, and nurses the old folk with tenderness. She uses the Bushman’s own medicines when she nurses a native, declaring that ours are not suited to him any more than is our form of life. He belongs to the hinterland, and there he must remain or die.

She is the one woman who knows the signs which reveal the doings and purposes of the natives, and she can talk to them in 188 of the dialects they have evolved. She knows their laws and the customs of nearly all their tribes. They have brought their sacred totems to her to guard; they have invited her to ceremonies which none of their own women may attend.

Photograph of Daisy Bates at Ooldea Siding

There is something very romantic in the thought of this white-haired woman sitting at the door of her tent listening to a group of black men who seek her advice, not as a powerful stranger but as one of the tribe, a wise ender of the race. She has an accumulation of material which some day she hopes to have the opportunity of putting into book form, to be a lasting record when the race has gone.

When a fire, which had been started by a careless Bush boy one Christmas time, threatened to sweep over her camp, her great fear was that these precious manuscripts might be destroyed. She buried them deep in the sand, and then spent her Christmas beating out the flames, working for hours.

She wears the same shirt-blouse, high collar, tie, and long skirt that women wore thirty years ago, but there is nothing old-fashioned about her ideas. She keeps abreast of modern thought and the world of events and is a brilliant talker. She writes us long and remarkable letters, and has long been a correspondent of the Children’s Newspaper on the edge of Barbarism. What time she can save from the carrying of water and continuous hard work of camp life she must spend in writing articles to help to fill her cupboard, for she has spent nearly all she had on her adopted blacks.

Three enchanted weeks she had at the end of 1933, when the Government invited her to Canberra to advise on the Aborigines question. Not only did the invitation hearten her with the assurance that the value of her work was recognized, but it meant, after all those years, three weeks of life as she used to know it, with her own kind around her.

The thing she loved most was to hear church bells again. The visit over, she returned to her tent, but she had not long to wait before the first day of 1934 saw her name in our Honours List. As a Commander of the British Empire her name is now for ever linked with the Empire whose most faithful and courageous servant she has been through all these years.

The editor of a newspaper receives through the post little pictures of life from the ends of the Earth, but we wonder if any contrast could be greater than the beginning and the ending of the letters Daisy Bates has been sending all these years to an editor in Fleet Street.

They come to a desk at the hub of the world from a tent in the great solitude of the Ooldea Plain. There this brave woman sits, with an intense love of England and an intense longing to see it once again, but with an intense love of this dying race of Blackfellows, and an intense longing to give them a friendly hand as they emerge from their barbaric world at the edge of civilisation. Year after year she had lived in her tent, alone for a generation, faithful to God and mankind, faithful to our Empire and the Flag and the spirit that sustains it, faithful to these poor people of a dying race.

She has in her something of the spirit of Joan and much of Florence Nightengale, and she is overflowing with the spirit of her Master, Whom she serves.

The following is a story preserved by Daisy Bates:

Nabbari belonged to a native nomad tribe whose home was in the wilds of Central Australia. She had never seen a book or a railway train or a white man’s house, but she was learned in the lore of her wandering people and this was enough to take her, alone with her little lame boy, across the heart of an unknown land.

There had been a quarrel and a wild commotion in her tribe, and during the frenzy her husband had been carried off. Perhaps he was killed and eaten. Nabbari never knew, but she knew beyond

all doubt that her husband was dead and that she and her son were in danger. She went and hid the child.

While she was in hiding her people rose up and went on a long food trek, southward. Nabbari knew that for her boy’s sake she must be with her relatives.

As soon as instinct told her it was safe to move she set off to follow the tribe. She had heard of their goal a far-off place called Ooldea Water.

All that Nabbari had for equipment when she left the scene of the camp on Mungana Water was a wooden spoon for digging out animal burrows, a pointed digging stick, and a lighted fire stick.

Her little boy, called Marburning, had a broken spear to help him in his lameness. So these two set off alone on a journey of unexplored direction and length.

Nabbari had two guides her instinct for direction and her skill in following tracks. Like all native Australians she could strike toward any point of the compass as straight as a bird.

For a few weeks the track led her through country she recognised. After that she stood on the threshold of the unknown that small face, with matted hair hanging over the brows, like a fly fringe on a horse, stood looking out across a land that had no beginning and no end.

This journey that no white man with the same material equipment could have achieved was the crowning test of her accumulated lore and native courage.

So long as her child lived she felt that she must not turn back, that she must go on till she found her people. Her chief concern was food; after that in keeping herself hidden; after that in obeying the various taboos of her tribe.

She studied the ground day by day as an astronomer nightly studies the stars. There were both old and new tracks made by her wandering tribe. Nothing escaped that intent face; and the child following her, watching, learned lessons that explorers and pioneers would give much to know. He helped in the food hunt, looking for marks that told where he would find honey or white ants, beetles, grubs that would do for food when birds and animals failed. The two caught rabbits, bandicoots (large rats), lizards, iguanas, foxes, even dingoes. Every animal track was followed up, for to Nabbari everything that could be killed could be eaten!

Marburning begged to be allowed to keep a dingo puppy, and the little thing went with them on the way.

Their path followed that which Nabbari spelled out on the uncharted ground, and as the first instinct of any tribe is to keep near water it was an oddly twisting path; but all the time it made southward. When for the sake of water Nabbari forsook it she had no peace till she had struck it again. In very dry districts she knelt by rock holes, tied grass on a stick, and sponged up the precious liquid.

For water she was constantly on the watch. Certain marks a broken bush, a stone in a tree, a long rush pointing in a special direction, told her their tale; and according to the signs she read she followed straight on or made wide detours. There was always with her the vivid fear of crossing a taboo mark. No matter how thirsty she was she must go round until she could avoid that. For if she crossed another tribe’s taboo mark she would be hunted down by them and killed. There were signs which told her when the tribe who had once drunk at certain waters had abandoned them. These she called orphaned waters, and after she had drunk these she would give her little death wail and go straight away.

She was, above all, anxious not to trespass on ground sacred to the religious rites of some other tribe, and would make a detour of weeks to avoid this. Now and again she and her boy came upon the scenes of old fights, with their cannibal feasts; and Nabbari learned from the footprints who were the killers and who the victims.

So she went southward with her child, like two specks in a vast waste, seeing nothing human, as the hundreds of miles rolled on, always on the look-out for the unknown, and frightened when she saw it. She was terribly frightened when her feet crossed a track where a man on a camel or a horse had once gone by. She had never seen a white man, camel, or horse, and from their traces she fled in abject fear.

Her greatest ingenuity was spent in hiding herself and trying to hide her tracks. A break-wind of branches, disposed as only a native who wishes to hide from his own kind can place them, made a screen for the wanderers at night. When they rose in the swamp and spinifer country they sheltered beside spinifer clumps.

Four seasons passed over the heads of the wanderers before they came to their journey’s end. Nabbari had made marks on her stick for every sandhill crossed. She could not count the fires she had made, but she had never let her stick go out; she knew it was forbidden to woman to make fire: that is man’s work. She found it impossible to remember how many times she had carried her boy on her shoulders when his lameness was hurting him badly. And they had come very near starvation once, when in following her tribe’s track Nabbari had halted at a place where all the food of any kind had been eaten up, and there was nothing left but some patches of grass seed.

At last the two came on the jumble of hills in the hollow of which lies Ooldea Water, and from one of these Nabbari looked down into the great plain which was the home of the great man-eating snake, the railway. But all round, on hill and valley, were the fresh tracks of those she knew, and she was aware she was not far from the camp of her people.

The little white dots on the edge of the Plain that were the houses of settlers had no meaning for her. She took courage, however, to light a little fire and make a “woman smoke” signal.

Some of her people saw it and went out to greet her, and took her to the camp. It happens that the place of the camp was not far from the home of a settler who is a trusted friend of the natives, Mrs. Daisy Bates. Nabbari was made to go to see the friend of her people, and by degrees Mrs. Bates got her story from her.

Mrs. Bates worked it out that Nabbari had walked a thousand miles in leading her boy to safety, and she thought that such a story should not be lost.

Chapter 16  José Rizal

1861-1896 A.D., South Seas

He was a Filipino, born in the days when the Philippines were under the tyrannous sway of Spain.

The Filipinos were a highly intelligent people who built far better ships than the Spaniards, were clever weavers and goldsmiths, had understood gunpowder long before Europeans did, and wrote poetry in the time of Caedmon. Yet the Spaniards treated them like savages, and there was no justice for them.

José Rizal was born of an old and cultured family. His parents were staunch patriots who criticized Spanish abuses, but they were also Christians. His mother was a poet. They had the best house in Calamba. All the family were proud of José, who had displayed an exceptional skill in drawing before he was five years old.

But his childhood was shadowed. Hardly a day passed when he did not see the Lieutenant of the Civil Guard kick or cane some villager who had not bowed at a great distance. When Rizal came out of a lighted house into the darkness, he himself omitted to salute a Civil Guard whom he did not see, and the Guard slashed him across the back with his sword.

When José was about eleven there was a rising and an innocent old priest of 85, dear to the family, was led to the public place in Manila, praying for his Spanish enemies, and there garroted.

About this time José’s father was hapless enough to offend the local magistrate, and an absurd charge of intent to murder a sister-in-

Photograph of José Rizal

law was brought against José’s mother. Even the Spanish courts could not condemn her, but on one pretext or another she was kept in prison for two years. Young Rizal grew up burning to liberate his country from these things. He studied in Madrid, Paris, Leipzig, and Berlin. Everywhere men of science became his friends. He spoke twelve languages. He composed music. He understood ethnology and engineering. He was an athlete as well as a scholar, a caricaturist, and a novelist.

His mother was going blind, so José determined to be an oculist. While he was studying diseases of the eye in Paris, he began to write a novel of Philippine life. It has since become famous. Every incident in it is founded on fact. It is a terrible indictment of tyranny, but it is still more a call for patriotism. The loveliness of the fatherland, the nobility of their women, the dignity of their traditions are shown to the Filipinos, and they are told, “No, you are not savages!”

In order to get money to pay for the printing of this novel, José lived on bread and coffee. Then a rich student helped him and the book was published. Smuggled into the Philippines it ran through the isles like wildfire. The Government announced that anyone found with the book in his possession would be deported and all his property given to whoever informed against him. In spite of that it was read everywhere, and was buried in gardens for safety. José’s mother was now quite blind. He took the risk of coming home to see if he could help her, and was able to make a complete cure by an operation for cataract. Then he was warned to leave the islands.

After traveling in England and America, he settled in Hong Kong, where he practiced as an oculist. A sister kept house for him. He wrote two more novels and many articles for a paper that circulated in the Filipino Colony in Madrid. His cry was ever for the education of his people. The Filipinos, he said, must prove themselves so worthy of liberty that the Spaniards would be shamed into granting it. He never incited men to hopeless revolution. He clamored for reforms, but from the hands of the Government. Hate is a monster, he said, knowing that it is the human enemy.

Rizal had a quiet manner and a low, musical voice. He was handsome with flashing black eyes. Everyone, even his enemies, fell under his spell when they got to know him personally. He was pure in his life, a man with inflexible honor. For the most part he was marked by melancholy of one who has seen much suffering, but he had a strong sense of fun, which bubbled into comic verse from time to time.

This brilliant and likeable man soon had a large practice but he was not able to enjoy success. News kept coming of how one member of his family after another was being persecuted. As the authorities could not punish him, they revenged themselves on his kin.

The Spanish Government promised him permission to enter Manila under a safe-conduct. But

Photograph of Teodora Alonzo Mercado Rizal, José Rizal’s mother

the Spaniards broke their word. He was seized, accused of sedition, and sentenced to banishment at Dapitan.

Rizal was officially a prisoner. Yet his guards trusted his honor so implicitly that he was allowed every freedom. He wandered about studying botany and natural history. Specimens he collected are to be found in European museums. He set up a water supply and a lighting system for Dapitan. He set up a school for boys. He showed the people how to cultivate their farms on scientific lines.

Patients came to the exiled oculist from far and wide. One brought with him an adopted daughter, a young Irish woman. In his youth, Rizal had loved a Filipino girl, whose mother wished her to marry a European. So she bribed a postal clerk to stop all the letters while José studied abroad. After long and patient waiting the poor girl thought Rizal was untrue to her and at last yielded to her mother’s pleas and married another. She discovered the truth too late, and died heartbroken shortly after her marriage. This girl is the heroine of Rizal’s great novel. But time had healed the wound. Rizal became happy in the love of the Irish girl. They were married.

A revolutionary society had been formed. Rizal was often pressed to join it, because no other name carried such weight among his countrymen, but he steadily refused to do so. In 1896 there was a rising. Rizal was hurried to Manila. Although every effort was made to get evidence against him and although even the thumbscrew was used on his brother, it was evident that Rizal was never a conspirator. So they charged him with having been a cause of rebellion through his writings.

Statue of Dr. Jose Rizal and Dr. Pio Valenzuela in the José Rizal Memorial Protected Landscape in Dapitan City, Zamobanga Del Norte, Philippines

Day after day, Rizal sat in court with his arms so tightly bound behind him that his elbows nearly touched and the sinews ached. A storm of indignation ran through Europe, but he had no hope of justice. He was condemned to be shot within 24 hours.

He wrote a noble and touching poem of farewell to his country. He hid it in the bowl of a lamp he was allowed to keep and bequeath to his sister with other personal trifles. So it was saved to move the hearts of men forever with his courage and serenity.

We think of Rupert Brooke’s If I Should Die as we read this eloquent farewell of a man about to die.

Little ’twill matter, then my country, that Thou shouldst forget me; I shall be air in the streets, and I shall be space in the meadow

With a rolling of drums, Rizal was led through the familiar streets of Manila. He spoke of the beauty of the morning, of the changes in the buildings. Once he said, “I used to walk here with my sweetheart.” When they reached the place of execution, he asked to be shot facing the firing party, but this was refused. A few moments more and his enemies had destroyed the body of the man whose spirit they could not kill.

But by that act they destroyed themselves and their own power among the Filipinos. This crowning cruelty was the death knell of Spanish rule. The whole nation rose as one man to avenge the death of their hero, and after a sharp tussle, during which Rizal’s widow fought in the trenches, the Spanish flag was hauled down. His mother lived to see it, as did his brother, Paciento, who suffered the thumbscrew for his sake.

Now the Spaniards have gone, there is a statue of Rizal in almost every Philippine town, and Rizal Day is celebrated every year. It is not the revolutionary general the people honor, but the man who inspired them with a love of country and a passion for justice.

Chapter 17  Karl T irén

1869-1955 A.D., Scandinavia

Though the people of Lapland have ceased to sing their old songs their curious melodies have not been lost, for there was a man who realized their value to music, and, as Cecil Sharp did with our own folksongs, he travelled through the country getting the old Lapps to sing into a phonograph while he jotted down these songs which tell of bears and reindeer, of mountains and of lakes.

Every animal, every lake and hill, had its particular tune, which tried to describe it in notes, as it might be the sacred Lake Rautusjaur, with quick notes representing the ripples across the water before the wind.

When Scandinavian missionaries first came to Lapland they found this singing a real obstacle. All the old songs were closely connected with primitive Nature-worship, and it seemed impossible to convert the people while they continued to sing their pagan songs. So the missionaries condemned the singing and called it a sin. As their teaching spread the singing gradually stopped, till the people hardly knew how to sing at all.

At this moment Karl Tirén opportunely came on the scene. He was about 37 when the big electric railway was being built across Lapland. He was employed on the line, and after months spent on a lonely station he came to know something of the Lapp nomads who moved about the country, and now and then he would hear snatches of their queer music, especially when a Lapp lost his temper. For a curious thing happened. Since singing had been condemned as wicked the Lapps had taken to singing as a man might curse when angered.

Karl Tirén was a musician, playing the violin with skill, and he realized that here was a whole strange system of folk-music dying out before him. Little counting the difficulties or dangers he decided to search all Lapland for tunes, write them down, and if possible get phonographic records

Karl Tirén, Frida Stéenhoff

of the actual singing.

Although Lapland has an unaccountable charm for all who have lived there it is a difficult country for the traveller. Three winter months of utter darkness are followed by three summer months of continual daylight, when fierce blood-sucking mosquitoes breed in such clouds that they will lie like a fog over the view. In winter the cold is so intense that a bit of cold iron will sear the skin as though it were red-hot. Every scrap of food must be carried on the back or dragged in a sledge.

There are no roads, and to lose one’s direction may mean death.

All the near spots had been converted long ago and the Lapps refused to sing; so Karl Tirén had to tramp long journeys, summer and winter, to reach the far outlying places.

Even there, however, the Lapps would only dare to sing in strictest secrecy. Often on these journeys he was in danger of death from exhaustion and hunger; but apart from the natural dangers he had to encounter another was added.

The missionaries had by now gone away, leaving in their place Lapp preachers who became afraid when they heard what he was doing. They had been taught that singing was wickedness, and to them Karl Tirén appeared little more than a henchman of the Evil One himself. To these still uncivilised Lapps the best thing they could do for their religion seemed to be to have the musician murdered on one of his song-collecting journeys.

Only this, they thought, would stop him from spreading the old sin of paganism.

By good fortune and judgment he somehow managed to evade all the plots against him, and in the end he succeeded in collecting about a thousand tunes, all of which would have been lost but for him. In 1913 his labours were crowned by a great recital of Lapp music, poetry, and singing, held

The Patch Town in Abisko, Karl Tirén

in Stockholm. Everyone was enthusiastic, and one of Sweden’s best composers wrote a Lapp symphony on the tunes Tirén had found. But had Karl Tirén come to Lapland only 15 years later the whole of this peculiar historically interesting music would have disappeared.

Photograph of Karl Tirén

Chapter

18  Edward Adrian Wilson

1872-1912 A.D., Explorers

Of all the heroic souls who have spent themselves in widening the horizon of knowledge none shines with a steadier lustre than Edward Adrian Wilson, the doctor-artist who lies buried with Scott and Bowers amid the eternal ice and snow of the Antarctic Continent.

Never did a man prepare more ideally than Wilson for the triumph that was to end in his death. Born at Cheltenham in 1872, he inherited a passion for natural history from his grandfather, a natural bent toward science from his father, a famous doctor, and artistic ability from both sides of his family, which had given to the world notable artists as well as men born to command in warlike affairs. From the time that he was six little Edward would sprawl on the hearthrug sketching objects about him or evolving designs from his imagination. He mastered the names and habits of all the birds in his neighbourhood. Once some plover eggs that he was carrying home hatched in his pocket, whereupon he took the fledglings back to their nest, a picture that will recur to mind presently in an Antarctic setting.

At school he was the foremost naturalist, and enriched the magazine with drawings and notes on his field observations. At Cambridge University, while science was his first love, he was a close student of art and literature, and a sufficiently good oarsman to row for his college. From the University he passed to St. George’s Hospital, London, and while studying threw himself into slum work in Battersea, which he helped with money and loving effort for a number of years.

And the man who was to eclipse all records in human endurance in the Far South worked

Photograph of Edward Adrian Wilson, courtesy of the NOAA

himself to such a pitch of exhaustion that tuberculosis seized him and compelled him to spend a year in a sanatorium at Davos and two years in Norway, roughing it and sleeping in the open. He made a perfect recovery, returned to professional practice and the study of art in London, and was so fit by 1901 that Captain R. F. Scott had no hesitation in choosing him as junior surgeon and naturalist of the Discovery expedition to the Antarctic. There the two heroes got to know and value each other, and for the great sledge journey over the ice in 1902 Scott chose him and Shackleton as his companions, an honour that Wilson never forgot. It was a memorable journey, 59 days out over 380 miles of sea ice to the Farthest South up to then attained. The record is on the map; Cape Wilson marks the point from which they turned back. The journey home to the ship was terrible, for Shackleton was seized with scurvy, and Wilson and Scott had to do all the pulling; and it was only Wilson’s skill as a doctor and loving-kindness as a friend that got the sick giant back to safety.

The expedition ended, Wilson, who had married three weeks before sailing, came back to London to obtain an appointment on a commission that was investigating a mysterious disease that was devastating the grouse of the country. Here was another unconscious preparation for the epic of his life. He almost lived on our northern and Scottish moors, camping out to watch the sleeping and waking habits of the birds. He dissected over two thousand stricken grouse with his own hands; and, wishing to test the contents of the dew that the birds drank, sat up in the open on a Forfarshire moor all one night in order to collect two or three drops for his microscope. And the night, bitterly cold, proved dewless!

Wilson was one of the first men chosen for the historic 1910 Antarctic expedition, Scott this time appointing him zoologist and chief of the scientific staff. He was doctor, artist, scientist, Scott’s right hand, every man’s beloved friend, adviser, leader, whom they affectionately nicknamed Uncle Bill but he was a man of iron, this lean, handsome doctor who had thrown off his early weakness and made himself the model of physical as well as of mental fitness.

He never talked his religion; he lived it, the happy, confident warrior who lived to serve his fellows and to battle, not with men, but with the profoundest secrets of Nature sought in the most terrible of her fastnesses. Of course the march to the Pole and back to death is the crowning, tragic glory of this beautiful and inspiring career; but during the first winter, after the arrival of the Terra Nova in the ice, he led an expedition that has no parallel in the history of human valour and endurance. But for the heart-breaking sequel to it all his journey with Birdie Bowers and Cherry-Garrard to the Emperor penguins would be the outstanding glory of the whole marvelous adventure.

Alone of the birds the Emperor penguin breeds in the depth of winter out on the sea ice. It is one of the nearest links with the earliest of bird forms, and Wilson determined to investigate its habits and to get some eggs so that he might examine the chick within and read something of the past history of the development of this unique species.

Now, in the ordinary course in Polar exploration the men have to lie up in winter, almost hibernating; but Wilson chose the winter for a terrific march from Cape Evans, the base, to Cape Crozier, where he knew the penguins collected. It was the season of darkness, day and night. The way lay over dreadful ridges of broken ice, over hidden crevasses down which they fell from time to time; over going so rough that they had to haul their stores in relays, doing three miles for every mile forward, and working by candle-light and the pale gleam of a hurricane lamp.

Never before had men endured such temperatures when travelling and sleeping in a flimsy

tent 102 degrees of frost at times; saturated with moisture in their bags at night, frost-bitten on face, hands and feet by day; bruised, cut, and battered by falls on sharp ice and rocks. They reached Cape Crozier and found themselves faced by sheer cliffs of ice, deadly dangerous in the darkness, with the birds out on the sea ice, inaccessible. But they did get down; by means that make the head swim with dizziness as one reads they got three penguins and four eggs.

Just as he took the plover fledglings back, so again Wilson was moved with fear and compassion lest he should drive all the penguins from their eggs and so lose a generation of young. The birds have no nest, but incubate the eggs on their feet in a little fold of skin at the base of the abdomen; and panic might have frightened the brooding birds into letting go the whole batch of eggs to become addled on the ice. So he contented himself with his few and determined to return to watch and make notes on a later day.

They built themselves a hut of rock and ice to make that their home, using their tent as a storehouse; but they had no sooner installed themselves than a great gale arose. It first filled the hut with fine snow driven through the crevices in the walls, and added to that fine intolerable black dust from a moraine. Then it ripped off the canvas roof of the hut and tore it to shreds, at the same time blowing their tent away.

There for the next 48 hours they lay in 100 degrees of frost, with no roof, with not a crumb of food or a sip of moisture, with frost-bite scorching hands and feet and faces, as if red-hot irons were searing them. Cherry-Garrard thought death was upon them, but made no murmur. Wilson was unshaken; at times through the howling of the blizzard he was heard cheerily humming a little hymn

Beaufort Island, Edward A. Wilson

to himself as he lay muffled in his torn and sodden sleeping-bag, all but regardless of the elements. When the gale at last moderated a little they got up, raised their last bit of canvas their floorsheet over their heads, and beneath it lighted their stove, cooked a meal, and ate and drank their first nourishment for two days and two nights, with the ground-sheet held tightly down on them and the stove the whole time. Then, going out, they followed the course of the wind, found their tent, which had come to rest a mile away, and so were saved.

But the accident made it necessary to start for home at once, for their cooker was smashed. Back they went, taking three eggs and three penguin skins, and arrived after appalling perils, stiff with ice.

Cold and misery had prevented them from sleeping at night, but they fell asleep as they toiled at the sledges, and when they entered the hut at Cape Evans they looked like dead men incapable of falling down. But throughout Wilson had been the fairy godfather. After Bowers’s terrifying fall down a crevasse, he himself walked on ahead, tethered to the sledge, but by a rope 100 feet long, so that in case of accident the danger should come to him and not to his companions.

The arrival at the hut produced an incident that marked the man. They had been absent five weeks on an unprecedented effort, and Wilson feared that the sight of one or two of them might cause a shock to Scott and the rest; so although they could barely totter, and lips and eyes were stiff with ice, he whispered an order that they should spread themselves out so that all three of them might be instantly perceived if they were detected from afar, and thus assure the rest that all of them were alive.

That is how we got our knowledge of the Emperor penguins’ breeding habits, a gift of teaching bought by gallantry and suffering such as no men had previously survived.

When the great march to the Pole began, Wilson had charge of a pony, Nobby, and Nobby was the smartest little horse in the whole team, with his mane and forelock a picture, thanks to his proud master’s clever hands. Those hands had already produced superb drawings of Antarctic scenery. Wilson would sketch rapidly and beautifully with bare hands till frost seized his fingers, when he would pull on his fur mits till circulation returned, then swiftly jot notes on the margins as to the colours he must use when he came to paint in the hut, an arrow marking the position of every shade that was to come in.

One party after another, having deposited its food for the Polar group’s return, turned back to the base, and finally there were left Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Petty Officer Evans to haul the sledges to the Pole. The going was heavy, the weather was bad, but they arrived on January 18, 1912, to find that Amundsen had stolen a march on them and reached the coveted goal 35 days in advance of them.

The way back to disaster revealed Wilson at his noblest. Evans’s heart was broken by Amundsen’s act and he began to go to pieces. Wilson, at the risk of his own safety, treated him as he had treated Shackleton years before, and kept him going till a fall on the Beardmore Glacier caused this brave fellow fatal concussion and made him a burden instead of a help. He died a natural death, a hero broken by adversity. Wilson was struck by snowblindness, and, over-burdened by the extra pulling now necessary, strained a tendon in one of his legs.

But nothing dimmed his splendid spirit. Scott's diaries are full of references to his nobility of courage, his undying determination. Next poor, brave Oates broke down, so frost-bitten that his

hands and feet became useless and a torture.

He too became Wilson’s patient. “What shall I do; what can I do?” he pitifully asked. “Slog on; just slog on,” gently answered Wilson, and the noble fellow slogged on, dying at every step till at last, realising that he was imperilling the lives of the others, he walked out of the tent in a blizzard, saying, “I am going out, and may be some time.” He walked to his doom so that his comrades might live.

But the spectre of death dogged the devoted trio. There were temperatures of 50 degrees below zero, accompanied by terrific head winds, and ice crystals on the surface made the going like sand. They were starving to death as they strove onward. Wilson, “quick, careful and dexterous, tough as steel on the traces, never wavering from start to finish,” as Scott wrote, mastered his snowblindness and ignored the strained ligament in his leg, superb in his composure, ever the counsellor and comforter.

Never will it be forgotten that with death lowering upon them he collected fossils on the moraines of the Beardmore and, though they weighed 35 pounds, succeeded in inducing Scott and Bowers to haul them with him to the end. Their weight may have been just sufficient to ensure their failure to reach the depot in which abundant food lay. But to Wilson they seemed worth dying for. They contained coal and other fossils, telling of a time when this ferocious glacier was part of a land basking in tropical sunshine, with trees and running rivers, a paradise where now nothing beyond white desolation prevails.

The little party pitched their tent for the last time on March 21, 1912, with food for two days and fuel sufficient to warm one meal. Eleven miles away was One Ton Camp, with life and food and warmth for them, but a blizzard raged for ten days. They faced death calmly, resolved, as Scott wrote, that their end should be “natural.” One day’s march and they would have been saved; but one by one they died in the little tent, martyrs to the ever-calling quest of the unknown.

Bowers and Wilson died first; Scott out-lived them a little, and with his dying hand wrote the epitaph of his beloved comrades.

Camping after Dark, Edward A. Wilson

Of Wilson he said: “He died, as he lived, a brave, true man, the best of comrades and staunchest of friends.” Silence descended over this little tabernacle of death, and for eight months a fearful uncertainty brooded over the rest of the expedition at the base.

A search party set out in quest with the coming of spring in the following October, and after a fourteen-days march came upon the tent. There lay the three heroes, dead. There was a smile on the unchanged features of Wilson, the smile that had endeared him to all who wrought and toiled with him. Scott, in his last hour, had opened his own sleeping-bag and had died with his right hand resting on the breast of Wilson, the man whom above all others he had loved and relied on.

Who can read unmoved the last letters Wilson wrote in the tent where he passed away with Scott?

They were printed in Mr. George Seaver’s Life of Dr. Wilson, and we take a few passages from them. This is from his letter to Mr. Reginald Smith, K.C.:

This looks like a finish to our undertaking, for we are out of food and oil, and not able to move now for three days on account of the blizzard.

We have had a long struggle against intense cold on very short fuel, and it has done us up. We shall make a forlorn-hope effort to reach the next depot tomorrow, but it means 22 miles, and we are none of us fit to face it.

I want to say how I have valued your friendship and your example, and how I and my beloved wife have loved you both from first to last. God be thanked for such as you. We shall meet in the hereafter.

I have no fear of death only sorrow for my wife and for my dear people; otherwise all is well. I should like to have seen the Grouse Book, but it is not allowed me. God’s will be done.

And this from his last letter to his wife:

I leave this life in absolute faith and happy belief that if God wishes you to wait long without me it will be to some good purpose. All is for the best to those that love God, and oh, we have both loved Him with all our lives. All is well…

My beloved wife, these are small things, life itself is a small thing to me now, but my love for you is for ever a part of our love for God… I do not cease to pray for you and to desire that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will.

God knows I am sorry to be the cause of sorrow to anyone in the world, but everyone must die, and at every death there must be some sorrow… All the things I had hoped to do with you after this expedition are as nothing now, but there are greater things for us to do in the world to come. My only regret is leaving you to struggle through your life alone, but I may be coming to you by a quicker way. I feel so happy now in having got time to write to you. One of my notes will surely reach you.

Dad’s little compass and Mother’s little comb and looking-glass are in my pocket. Your little Testament and prayer-book will be in my hand or in my breast pocket when the end comes. All is well.

In another note to his wife runs the same undaunted faith:

Don’t be unhappy; all is for the best. We are playing a good part in a great scheme arranged by God Himself, and all is well.

So passed this noble Edward Wilson from our small Earth to the illimitable realm where heroes are. In death he and his comrades were not divided. They were left where they were found, with a huge cairn of snow above them, and there they rest together in their last sleep embalmed and unchangeable in a temperature which will preserve them unimpaired for centuries.

Wilson was the greatest of all that gallant little band of heroes, his loss the heaviest to science; but his example is an imperishable inheritance of chivalry and valour for mankind.

Chapter 19  Sundar S

ingh

Born 1889 A.D., Asia-India

In the year 1922 many people in England saw and heard in public meetings an Indian dressed in a saffron robe, such as religious teachers wear in India. He was the Sadhu Sundar Singh, an Indian Christian who lived as a wayfarer among his people, as St. Francis lived in Umbria long ago. He was last seen in 1929 as he went down the road leading to Tibet; it is believed that he is dead, but when or where or how he died no one knows.

Sundar was born in 1889, the child of rich parents in the State of Patiala in North India. He was brought up in luxury. He was by race a Sikh of the Sikhs, a religious community, which may be likened to the Puritans. They have their own sacred book, the Granth, in which Sundar was trained early. From the first, as he put it, he was not a Sikh, but a seeker.

In his seeking there came an hour in which he found the Bible. At first he cut it to pieces and burned it; but he could find no peace. Three days after he had burned his Bible he was in such despair that he meant, if some light was not given him, to put his head upon the railway line and end the struggle. Then at half-past four one morning there came a great light, and in that light he believed he saw Jesus Christ. That was for him, as it was for Saul of Tarsus, a moment from which he dated his new life.

His people drove him out of their house; he spent the first night away from home under a tree, shivering with

Photograph of Sadhu Sundar Singh

cold but happy as he had never been before. He was baptized in 1905 and took the garment of a Hindu holy man. He was now a Christian but did not cease to be an Indian and to follow the ways his people understood. He went through training in theology, and received a license to preach in the church; but he preferred to take the road and to wear the saffron robe by which his people understood that he was a man who had given up all things for the sake of his religion.

Everywhere in India he became a familiar figure, but his heart was always in the land behind the mountains, where his religion was unknown. Many visits he paid to these mountains.

Once an Indian in the Forest Service saw him come to a village. There he began to sing a hymn and a crowd gathered, but they were angry when they heard what he wished to tell them. One man dealt him a blow that knocked him down and cut his cheek. Without a word, he rose, bound up his wound and began to sing and to bless those who persecuted him.

In many such ways Sundar Singh lived his Christianity. He loved best to walk along the ways of India, using every encounter with humanity to show his love.

The last news we have of him dates from 1929. In the village of Kotgarth there was a little community of people living together; they were a strange company, among them being two children of lepers; and one of the others was blind, and another a cripple.

Often had Sundar stayed there. Beyond is a fall of 3000 feet in five miles where the Sutlej River rushes through the mountain gorge; then there is a climb of 4000 feet and beyond that is the land

Diocese of Chandigarh, Church of North India in Faridkot, Punjab, India

that always called to Sundar Singh.

They last saw him striding along that way. For a long time they waited news of him, but none came; and nobody knows what happened to him then.

Photograph of Sadhu Sundar Singh

Chapter 20

Fi-Ken

Mid-1800s A.D., Asia-China

Fi-Ken was the eldest of the six children of the merchant Hoang. In the province of Kiang, where they lived, an officer of justice who was in great favour at the Palace made use of his power to persecute the people, condemning to death innocent persons whose wealth he coveted.

None dared to remonstrate until Hoang had the courage to complain to the Governor of the man’s continual wickedness. The Governor, however, threatened to imprison Hoang if he said another word against the favourite.

Chafing at his helplessness Hoang set out for home, and on the way met the unjust officer; he was dragging along an old woman who, knowing what mercy she might expect from him, was

A tea plantation in China: monkeys gather tea leaves for men, courtesy of Science Museum Group

struggling and weeping. Hoang was already furious, and this sight made him lose his self-control. He threw himself on the officer, knocked him down, and killed him.

For this crime the merchant was arrested and sentenced to death.

As soon as Fi-Ken heard the sentence he went to see the Governor, who at first refused to grant him an audience, but the child returned day after day. At last his perseverance was rewarded and he was received. Then FiKen asked that he might be permitted to die in his father’s place, so that his father might be spared to support the family.

The Governor, suspecting the boy had been told to say this, sent him to the Prime Minister, who asked who had suggested to him the idea of offering his life for his father.

“No one except He from whom all good thoughts come,” replied Fi-Ken.

The Minister pointed out that Fi-Ken’s mother would be able to marry another husband to care for her family. “Not one who would be the same to her and would love my brothers and sisters as our father does,” persisted FiKen. Then the Minister left the room, telling him to wait. When he returned Fi-Ken was sure that the exchange would be accepted, and began to thank him, but the Minister said: “It is not your condemnation that I

3 Euleuths, Julien-Léopold Boilly

Execution scene in China, 1860

bring, but your father’s pardon. A man who knows how to bring up such generous children cannot be guilty.”

The Governor, convinced now of Fi-Ken’s sincerity, wished to erect a monument to commemorate his devotion, but Fi-Ken refused the honour, because anything that brought to mind his willingness to sacrifice his life for his father would also remind people of the father’s condemnation.

On the way to Ku-shan, western China, 1860

Chapter 21 

Hideyo Noguchi

Died 1928 A.D., Asia-Japan

Many a time Hideyo Noguchi watched other Japanese boys playing freely with both hands; many a time he glanced down at one of his own and let the wide folds of his kimono cover it. He was sensitive about that left hand, so gnarled and scarred, with nothing remaining but the first joints of the fingers all joined by adhesions of skin growing between. That crippled hand, a joke to the other boys, was a tragedy to him, and he hid it from sight when he could.

As a baby crawling about the floor he was attracted by the glowing charcoal in the hut which was his home. His childish fingers must have meddled with it, with the result that he lost the fingers of his left hand, and all but lost his life.

Nobody was to blame. His mother, a poor peasant, was driven to work hard on the little plot of ground to feed herself and her baby. She could not foresee that leaving him while she cultivated the soil would have such dire results. Her mother love saved his life, but she could not save the baby fingers, which were burned away.

Life is full of the queerest twists and turns. Noguchi as a boy would much rather have had two good sound hands. With them he could have worked on the land to help to keep his mother. His maimed hand made him useless for such hard work, so he shrank from the other boys, and spent all

Photograph of Hideyo Noguchi

his time learning to read and to write with a brush, as was the Japanese way.

The loss of that poor hand, which he regarded as such a tremendous handicap, was really responsible for his achieving world-wide fame. One day, when Noguchi was a lad, he heard that a doctor in a distant town might do something for his hand. Borrowing a trifling sum, he went over to see the medical man, who proved to be a modern doctor with a good scientific training. Taking the maimed hand in his own the doctor examined it carefully, pressing here and there to find out what had happened to the bones. They were intact up to the first joint, so he saw that by operating he could separate the stumps and enable the boy to use them.

The doctor, as doctors will, talked to the young patient to find out something about him, and was surprised to learn that this son of a peasant woman, born and reared in abject poverty, was able to read and write and seemed rather more intelligent than the sons of well-to-do parents. So attracted was the doctor that he offered the boy the chance of helping him in the surgery.

Noguchi for the first time had come into contact with a modern medical man, and could move the stumps of his maimed fingers to prove to himself what knowledge and skill could achieve for those who suffered. The lad saw his chance and grasped it. He would help the doctor in the humblest capacity, and perhaps he too might some day learn to become a doctor.

From doctor’s boy to doctor was a big step. It meant acquiring knowledge, having a long training, and finding money. But Noguchi could not see the difficulties that lay in his way. His mind was so intent on the goal that he could perceive nothing else.

Leaving his humble home, he took up his new duties and made the first step toward a new life, one far removed from that of the poor peasant class into which he was born. He washed bottles with the other boys whom the doctor employed, and helped to mix drugs, making the best use he could of his injured hand and taking great care to cover up his affliction as much as possible.

Then one day the doctor called the boys to him.

“Look!” he said, and pointed to the microscope.

Very eagerly the boys crowded round, and one by one gazed through the eyepiece upon the field of dazzling white beneath.

“It’s a spirochaete,” said the doctor, and asked the boys to let him know if they could

Photograph of Dr. Hideyo Noguchi

see it.

To find anything in the field of a microscope requires training and a keen eye. Eyes differ, of course, and what is in focus for one is out of focus for another. The microscope, therefore, may need slight adjustments for each eye that peers into it. Many people looking into a microscope for the first time can see nothing at all, yet they do not like to admit it. It seems to savour of some inferiority, and so they say they can see what they cannot see.

But when Noguchi’s turn came the doctor had no doubts about what he had seen. The way the lad drew in his breath, the intent look that came over his face before he said one word, told the doctor that the keen dark eye was gazing on the spiral-shaped worm which was the cause of a fever in Japan. From that instant Noguchi’s mind was made up. He would be a bacteriologist, so that he could study spirochaetes and many other kinds of parasites and germs in an endeavour to help humanity. He wanted to help not only his own people, but all people.

It was a fine ideal that rooted itself in the heart and mind of the doctor’s boy. That he should aspire to follow in the steps of Pasteur and Lister and Manson and other great healers was a tribute to the nobility of the Japanese peasant boy; that he, who had no money, should attempt to carry out his plan was the measure of his unflinching courage.

From that day he began his struggle. The spirochaete was the dragon he wanted to slay. He was blessed with a pleasing manner and it served him well. Just as the doctor was attracted by him so were other people. They believed in him, began to credit him with a spark of genius, lent him money so that he could live while he carried on his studies.

Noguchi accepted it as his due. The end to him was everything. If those who lent the money expected it back again they were disappointed, for he had no money sense. But he amply repaid his benefactors by studying hard and getting on. A friend found him work which brought him in a trifling sum a month. Even the trifle helped. He slept in the room of first one friend and then another, because he could not afford to pay rent. For the same reason he even slept surreptitiously in a building where he studied and worked. In those days Noguchi was so sure of himself, he had no doubts, and none of his friends doubted him. They considered he was a genius.

A post in the laboratory of one of the most famous Japanese bacteriologists, the great Kitasato, who discovered the cause of bubonic plague, was found for him. It was an honour to work and study under such a master. Yet the son of the peasant who had risen so high was not content. His eyes turned westward to America. If only he could get there, work in some of the wonderful laboratories, study their technique, and carry out experiments of his own, what might he not do? Such were the thoughts that ran through his brain.

He told his friends of his dreams, and they found the money to make them come true. One so enthusiastic and clever was welcomed in Philadelphia. He was eager to learn and so charming that they were glad to have him. Later his quest for knowledge to help humanity took him across the Atlantic to Copenhagen to work in the Serum Institute there and learn the technique of making those antitoxins which cure disease.

Back to the United States he went, thanks again to the monetary assistance of his friends, to settle down in his own laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute where he worked and won his niche in the Hall of Fame.

The first thing Noguchi ever saw under a microscope was that spirochaete which inspired him

to become a bacteriologist: now one inspired him to lay its secret bare.

There are several invisible spiral worms, each of which causes a different disease. The world over scientists were trying to induce one of these to grow apart from the human body. They made special foods for it and placed some of the parasites on the food, hoping to see them feed and flourish. But the parasites simply died off. It seemed that the spirochaete would only live and multiply inside the human body, or in the body of a monkey.

Yet, if science were to find out all about this parasite which caused so much suffering it was essential to grow it in the laboratory so that experiments could be carried out and certain tests made.

The fact that many bacteriologists in many countries had been baffled by this difficult problem did not dismay Noguchi. He set himself to solve the problem with the same enthusiasm and determination that had gained for him his place as a scientist. He worked at high pressure and took little sleep. All the methods that other men had tried were tested by him so that he could feel sure they had made no mistake.

Two, three, four years he carried on his quest. Thousands of times he took some of the parasites and placed them on a special food at different temperatures to see if he could make them grow. He failed.

Four years of failure left him undaunted. After each failure he tried something new. He refused to believe that the thing which had baffled other men could not be accomplished. He would not bow down to defeat.

For five years Noguchi fought with the spirochaete to unmask its secret. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he saw the way. Like many great discoveries, it was so simple. In all his experiments, in the experiments of all the other men, there had been air in the test tubes in which they tried to grow the spirochaete.

“What if the air kills him?” Noguchi thought. “He may grow in the body without air at all!” He tried excluding the air from them in his test tubes, and the problem was solved.

Having achieved so much Noguchi went on to achieve more. With these parasites grown in the laboratory he carried out experiments and proved that this deadly minute worm, which no human eye had ever seen until the German scientist Schaudinn saw it under the microscope in 1905, was the cause of general paralysis of the insane, that eight cases out of ten of insanity were due to it. This minute spiral worm exacts a terrible toll from the future generation. It causes blindness in newly-born babes, it drives men and women insane and eventually kills them. This was the wonderful knowledge with which the world was enriched because a little Japanese boy saw a spirochaete under a microscope.

It is sad that the spirochaete which Hideyo Noguchi set out to master was the means of bringing him to his death. There was an outbreak of yellow fever at Guayaquil in the South American State of Ecuador, and Noguchi was sent there to see if he could find the germ that caused the disease. He called on the local doctors for samples of the blood of people who were suffering from yellow fever and started his search for the cause.

To his delight he saw under the microscope one day another spiral form similar to those which he had learned to know so well. He carried out a fine series of experiments which seemed to show that he had indeed discovered the cause of yellow fever. Going to Brazil, where there was more yellow fever, he carried out further tests, which were puzzling because they threw doubt on his

discovery.

One or two brilliant men in London considered that Noguchi had made a mistake and that his parasite was really the one which causes a disease named infectious jaundice. It throws a great light on the character of Noguchi, and shows what helped to endear him to his friends, when it is known that while he was immersed in all this work he yet found time to send to the writer of this article a long reply, in which he set forth all the evidence proving that he had discovered the cause of yellow fever.

He did not doubt it then; but as the years went by he began to wonder if he was wrong. The thought of a mistake weighed him down.

There was a mistake, but it was not his. The blood with which he first worked must have been taken from patients suffering from infectious jaundice, which so resembles yellow fever that it is easy to make a mistake. Noguchi did not know. He was given his material and he made his discovery but it was not new.

Wondering if there were two or three different forms of yellow fever, the brilliant Japanese scientist went out to Accra on the Gold Coast of Africa to prove or disprove his own work, to find out whether the terrible spirochaete against which he had waged war so long was responsible or not.

One or two friends tried to dissuade him from going; they knew how dangerous was the work and thought perhaps he might never return. He knew what they thought and that he might be going to his death.

“Yes, I suppose I may take yellow fever,” he said stoically, and told them he was determined to finish his work, no matter the risk.

Alas, the disease which he strove to conquer in order to help humanity conquered him. This time there was no doubt about the cases being true yellow fever. He carried out thousands of experiments, working at high pressure with an English bacteriologist, Dr. W. A. Young, and proved to himself that yellow fever was not caused by his spirochaete. According to his notes he seemed fairly sure that he had found the responsible organism when he was suddenly stricken with yellow fever and died. Within a day or two Young also died from the same terrible disease.

Photograph of Hideyo Noguchi and his mother Shika

How these two heroes of science were infected with the disease will never be known. As a rule a certain type of mosquito, the stegomyia, infects a man by biting him, but it is possible to become infected even through the unbroken skin, that the infective agent is minute enough to pass through the pores; the two scientists were no doubt infected while handling animals which had succumbed to yellow fever.

There is reason to believe that they were on the brink of a magnificent discovery when Yellow Jack wiped them out and preserved his secret for a little longer.

References

Mee, Arthur. 1934. Arthur Mee's 1000 Heroes: Immortal Men & Women of Every Age & Every Land. London; Amalgamated Press.